Brontës (7 page)

What is in considerable doubt is the reason why the courtship which, by Patrick's own admission, had become an engagement, was broken off. The accepted version of the story, which was told for the first time by Augustine Birrell in 1887, is that Mary's uncle intervened. He questioned the curate about his Irish origins, upon which he had apparently kept a sinister silence, and his future prospects, which the uncle evidently did not rate highly. The marriage was forbidden and Mary was then swept off to her uncle's house, where she was kept a virtual prisoner until Patrick had left Wethersfield. Patrick's letters to her were intercepted and destroyed and her uncle made him return all her letters. When Mary opened the parcel containing her own letters she found in it a small card with Patrick's likeness in profile on it and beneath it the words: ‘Mary, you have torn the heart; spare the face.' Hearing no more from her lover, Mary eventually gave up all hope and resigned herself to the end of her engagement.
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Though there is clearly an element of truth in this account, it still begs a lot of questions. Mary was financially Patrick's superior and, once she was of age or married, would possess ‘a handsome competency'.
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The Broad was a substantial house, constructed of lath and plaster, with four rooms and a dairy downstairs, five bedrooms upstairs and attics used as servants'
quarters. The house was surrounded by farm buildings and there was a large duck pond which also supplied all the water for the house and farm. In 1842 it was valued at £230 10d. and its appurtenances included a cottage and garden, arable fields, three grass lots and a wood.
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Some time before April 1823, the Burders moved a few miles away to another farm, The Park, near Finchingfield, which was owned by Mary's brother. The house was larger, more modern and more manorial in style than Broad Farm, though it was valued in December 1842 at only £196 1s.
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Undoubtedly land-owning wealth on this scale would compare badly with Patrick's curacy, worth only £60 a year, but his prospects were surely good: he was not slow to tell the Burders of his aristocratic friends and patrons and they must have recognized his ambition would take him beyond the narrow confines of a country parish in Essex. The relative financial status of the pair was not an insuperable problem.

Nor was it true that Patrick's letters to Mary were intercepted and destroyed: in August 1823 she told him she had recently perused ‘many letters of yours bearing date eighteen hundred and eight, nine and ten addressed to myself and my dear departed Aunt'.
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She had, therefore, not only received and kept his letters but also she or Miss Davy had continued to receive them for a full two years after Patrick had left Wethersfield. These letters, which, Patrick declared,

were written in your absence and which I entreat you never more to read, but to burn, were written when my mind was greatly distressed, and the only object of which was to hasten your return. These letters, I say, greatly distressed me soon after, and have greatly distressed me many a time since.
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They evidently made Mary deeply bitter, which suggests that Patrick, rather than her family, had been the cause of the breach of the engagement. Her review of his letters, she told Patrick,

excites in my bosom increased gratitude and thankfulness to that wise, that indulgent, Providence which then watched over me for good and withheld me from forming in very early life an indissoluble engagement with one whom I cannot think was altogether clear of duplicity. A union with you under then existing circumstances must have embittered my future days …
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These are the sentiments of a jilted woman and Mary's bitterness, even at
the distance of fifteen years, suggests that she considered herself to have been wrongfully repudiated.

We can only guess at what happened. Marriage was definitely in the air in the early summer of 1808, for Patrick at long last arranged for his name to be removed from the boards at Cambridge on 26 May.
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This meant that he had given up the possibility of being elected a college fellow, and the only reason for doing so, after two years, was that he intended to get married: only unmarried men could hold fellowships. Over the next few months he seems to have encountered opposition from the Burder family, which obliged him to give up his engagement because Mary was under the legal age to marry without consent. To ensure that there were no clandestine meetings, Mary was removed to Great Yeldham, perhaps under the impression that Patrick would wait for her until she was old enough to marry without her guardian's permission. The lovers were allowed a last meeting at which to say their farewells and Mary seems to have promised that, if Patrick came to Wethersfield again, she would receive him as a friend.
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While Mary was kept away from her suitor and had to face the wrath and curiosity of her family and neighbours, Patrick's position was equally difficult. His authority in Wethersfield had been considerably compromised by the affair, not least because the Burders refused to accept his assurance that he would not pursue Mary. There was nothing else for him to do but to look for another post.

Some time at the end of September or the beginning of October, Patrick travelled to Glenfield, a small parish just outside Leicester, where he had been offered a curacy. The then curate, John Campbell, and his vicar, Robert Cox, were both Patrick's contemporaries from Cambridge: Campbell was a graduate of Queens' College and Cox had been a sizar in the year below Patrick at St John's.
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On 12 November 1808 Patrick wrote to Campbell, telling him that he had decided not to accept the curacy at Glenfield. His letter is important, as it holds the key to the mystery of why Patrick never married Mary Burder.

Since I returned here, I have enjoyed more peace, & contentment than I expected I should have done. The Lady I mentioned, is always in exile; her Guardians can scarcely believe me, that I have given the affair entirely up forever. All along, I violated both the dictates of my conscience, and my judgment. ‘Be not unequally yoked', says the Apostle. But Virgil was not far wrong, when he said, ‘Omnia vincit Amor'; & no one can deny Solomons Authority, who tells
us that ‘Love is stronger than Death'. But for Christs sake we are, to cut off a right hand, or to pluck out a right eye, if requisite. May he by his grace enable me always to conform to his will.
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Patrick's quotation from St Paul has usually been taken to mean his acknowledgement of the unbridgeable social gulf which yawned between himself and Mary Burder. The quotation was used advisedly, however, for St Paul was actually referring to the marriage of Christians with non-Christians, which gives a completely different gloss on the matter. For Mary, though not of course an ‘unbeliever', was a Nonconformist, a worshipper at the Congregational chapel in Wethersfield, and not a member of the Church of England.
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As such, had Patrick married her, he would almost certainly have placed immense difficulties in his own path of future promotion; who would have appointed as their curate or minister a man who had a wife belonging to a completely different religious group? This would seem to be the explanation behind one of Mary's most sarcastic and wounding comments:

Happily for me I have not been the ascribed cause of hindering your promotion, of preventing any brilliant alliance, nor have those great and affluent friends that you used to write and speak of withheld their patronage on my account, young, inexperienced, unsuspecting, and ignorant as I then was of what I had a right to look forward to.
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No wonder Patrick recoiled in dismay from the ‘spirit of hatred, scorn, and revenge' which bristled off the pages of her letters when he tried to renew the friendship in 1823. Clearly he did not see the injury she felt he had done to her:

However, you may hate me
now
– I am sure you
once
loved me – and perhaps, as you may yet find, better than you will ever love another. But did I ever in any one instance take advantage of this or of your youth or inexperience?
You know
I did
not
. I, in all things, as far as it was then in my power, behaved most honourably and uprightly.
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It is a measure of his love for Mary Burder that he had allowed his heart to rule his head to the extent of asking for her hand in marriage. When her family opposed the match, Patrick saw this as the hand of God directing his
affairs: however much he loved her, his service to God came first and he was prepared to suffer personally (and make Mary suffer) in the process. This was no easy decision to make, however, and Patrick's letter to John Campbell shows that he agonized over the choice between his love and his duty:

who is he that can say he has not a wish unfullfilled? Oh! that I could make my God and Saviour, my home, my Father, my all! But this happy state is reserved for better men than I . I hope my dear Friend it is your portion. I often wish myself in your place: but Gods will be done; in due time he may bring me nearer to himself, & consequently nearer to heaven and happiness.
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He wrote to John Nunn too, pouring out his grief and anguish over the decision he had to make and describing the turmoil of his own spiritual state in terms so dark that Nunn felt obliged to destroy the letters.
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It should not be forgotten that, ambitious as he was, the Church was not the only career open to Patrick: he could easily have returned to teaching or private tutoring as a profession and, with his qualifications, he would not have been short of offers. Nor would teaching have been incompatible with marriage. It is perhaps the strongest evidence we have of Patrick's faith and his commitment to the Church that he chose to give up the woman he loved in order to serve his God.

Patrick may have made up his own mind as to where his duty lay by November 1808 but all the evidence suggests that Mary continued to believe he might marry her. Her references in 1823 to Patrick's letters of 1809 and 1810 and her insistence that it was the events of ‘the last eleven or twelve years', rather than the last fifteen, which had placed an ‘insuperable bar' to any revival of their friendship, point to the fact that it was not until some time after Patrick's departure from Wethersfield that she realized there was no hope. We know that Patrick had continued to write to her, either personally or through Miss Davy, after he had left Wethersfield. This, and the fact that, when they parted, Patrick assured her that he would return ‘if my circumstances changed for the better',
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seem to have led Mary to think that their engagement might be renewed, though it does not account for the complete absence of her replies. Perhaps Mary had even expected Patrick to return to claim her as his bride when he had settled in a living and she had reached her majority. It is significant, therefore, that Mary was twenty-one in 1811 or 1812, exactly the period when the breach really occurred.
Coincidentally – or perhaps not – this was also the period of Patrick's wooing of Maria Branwell, so it could be that Mary believed Patrick had actually jilted her to marry someone else.

In his own defence, Patrick claimed that he had written twice to Miss Davy from Dewsbury in 1810 and received no reply; that even after that, when he was vicar of Hartshead, he received no answer to the letters he wrote to the south: ‘from whence I concluded that all my Friends there were either dead or had forgotten me'. The only letter which had elicited any response was one to Mary's sister, Sarah, which led him to believe that Mary herself had married in the meantime.
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Patrick's genuine surprise and mortification at Mary's reaction to his renewal of correspondence in 1823 suggest that he had no idea of either the misery he had caused her or the unfulfilled hopes she had cherished concerning him. Perhaps, in the end, one can only accuse him of insensitivity to Mary Burder's feelings.

On 22 December 1808 Patrick took a burial service at Wethersfield followed, on the last day of the old year, by a marriage service. His final official duty in the parish was to register the burial, which he did on 1 January 1809.
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He then turned his back on Wethersfield, which had had such a momentous influence on his personal life, and set out for the grimmer pastures of the industrial north: there, he knew, he could fight the good fight for the Evangelicals and, if not wholeheartedly, at least completely, dedicate his life and work to the service of Christ.

It seems likely that Patrick secured his new post in Shropshire through the good offices of John Nunn, who was curate at Shrewsbury. Wellington could not have been more different from Wethersfield. Sheltering under the slopes of the Wrekin, which towers 1,100 feet above the flat marshes stretching northwards as far as the eye can see, Wellington was a busy town in the fast-developing industrial heartland of England. The River Severn and the Shropshire Union Canal, both nearby, had opened up the area for import and export and Wellington, like Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale less than five miles away, had a fast-growing trade in coal and iron. Industrial success had brought both wealth and poverty; the town was prosperous, with a regular Thursday market and four fairs a year, but rapid growth had brought an influx of impoverished immigrants seeking employment in the mines and foundries.
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Crammed into the narrow, bustling streets of the town were half-timbered houses from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hemmed in by the more elegant proportions of the red brick houses of the eighteenth.
There were a great many shops, mainly around the Market Square, where weekly markets had been held since 1244. There was a bank, set up in 1805 by the local squire and two industrial entrepreneurs, and a bookseller, recently turned printer and publisher, Edward Houlston. The large number of coaching inns around the town reflected the fact that Wellington straddled the routes to the midlands and the north: coaches ran several times daily to both Shrewsbury and London. The church, close to the Market Square, stood opposite the small green and was flanked on one side by the town prison and on the other by a large, plain, brick-built school, two storeys high, which during the week housed sixty day pupils and on Sundays a hundred Sunday Scholars.
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