The Mother of the Brontës

When Maria Met Patrick

Sharon Wright

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526738493
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

**At long last, the untold story of the mysterious Mrs Brontë.** They were from different lands, different classes, different worlds almost. The chances of Cornish gentlewoman Maria Branwell even meeting the poor Irish curate Patrick Brontë in Regency England, let alone falling passionately in love, were remote. Yet Maria and Patrick did meet, making a life together as devoted lovers and doting parents in the heartland of the industrial revolution. An unlikely romance and novel wedding were soon followed by the birth of six children. They included Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, the most gifted literary siblings the world has ever known. Her children inherited her intelligence and wit and wrote masterpieces such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet Maria has remained an enigma while the fame of her family spread across the world. It is time to bring her out of the shadows, along with her overlooked contribution to the Brontë genius. Untimely death stalked Maria as it was to stalk all her children. But first there was her fascinating life’s story, told here for the first time by Sharon Wright.

Chapter 1

Daughter of Penzance

To the little girl gazing from the windows of her cosy attic nursery, the whole world seemed arranged for her entertainment. Six-year-old Maria Branwell’s vantage points above Penzance’s busiest street afforded uninterrupted views of a most interesting place. Out front was the sea, with mysterious St Michael’s Mount in the distance, sometimes crystal clear in the bright sunshine against a blue sky, sometimes wreathed in sea mists, the waters of the bay slate grey and restless. Not far from her door the small boats and tall ships arriving, or departing to trade or to fight or to fish. All the mercantile and military hullabaloo of a busy port in a seafaring nation. Directly below her window, merchants and redcoats stopped to discuss the French Revolution just over the horizon in one direction, American Independence an ocean away in another.

If Maria padded to the rear of the house, she could watch the comings and goings in the graveyard of St Mary’s Chapel, a short cut for locals and sailors that ran almost up to the back door. She fell asleep to waves slapping the harbour and if she awoke in the night, it was to the muffled clatter from smugglers’ tunnels below the old tavern nearby. The life swirling around 25 Chapel Street in the late eighteenth century was full of trade and science, myths and legends, war and peace. Maria was born into one of the most important families in town. She was a Branwell and in Georgian Penzance, that meant something.

As Maria drew her first breath on 15 April 1783, her parents Thomas and Anne (sometimes spelled Ann) could only have felt both hope and fear. Five Branwell babies had already died before their fifth birthday. Their first child was born in April 1769 and named Anne for her mother. Fifteen months later came Margaret and the following summer, 1771, a son named Thomas after his father. September 1772 brought Elizabeth, with Jane born in November 1773, followed by Benjamin in March 1775.

Then in early 1776, three-year-old Elizabeth and four-year-old Thomas fell ill, maybe from that winter’s influenza outbreak in west Cornwall. Thomas died on 22 February, followed next day by his little sister. Anne and Thomas stood in the chapel graveyard huddled together beneath the winter sky as their tiny children were placed in the family tomb. At 33, one third of her children were lost but within a month of the pitiful double funeral, Anne was pregnant again.

The baby was born in December and given the name of her dead sister, so the Elizabeth that Anne nursed at the close of that painful year was not the one she had held at its start. This second Elizabeth Branwell was strong and would again bring comfort after bereavement, to her Brontë nieces and nephew.

The terrible proximity of birth and death in the late 1700s meant the Branwell story of infant mortality was not unusual and the couple’s suffering far from over – their next three babies died one after another. A second Thomas was born in March 1778 and was dead by the following January. Four months later came baby Alice, who may have lived only a short time as there is no record of her baptism. The second baby Alice arrived in December 1780 but survived only ten months and the defeated parents never used a name three times. Causes of death went unrecorded but at the time, parts of the country suffered epidemics of smallpox and a particularly virulent scarlet fever.

After this string of bereavements, Anne was shattered and took – or was allowed – a break from childbearing to recover. Three and a half years had passed in a whirlwind of short-lived joy and consuming grief as she and Thomas welcomed three children and buried them one by one before they outgrew the cradle. It was a bleak time and difficult to navigate as a family, the older children growing towards adulthood as the little ones perished. Anne carrying one baby in her belly as she held another in her arms, already slipping away. It was a common story for a woman of her day, though no less painful for that.

By the time she fell pregnant with Maria in the summer of 1782, she was pushing 40 and her youngest, Elizabeth, was almost seven. With five children safe in their beds and five in their graves, Anne took Maria to her breast in the spring of 1783 with no way of knowing where this newborn girl would end up.

Though petite like Elizabeth, Maria was healthy and for the next six years the baby of the family. For a long time, it seemed she would remain the youngest of the Branwell brood, then in November 1789 the attic nursery had a new addition. At the age of 46, Anne had her twelfth and final baby, a little sister for Maria called Charlotte.

Maria arrived into a comfortable clan, when the family was newly established as a prosperous and important part of Penzance society. The journey to Chapel Street, however, was a long one. ‘For the whole of the 1800s the name of Branwell was one of distinction in Penzance,’ writes Richard G. Grylls in Branwell and Bramble: a brief history of a West Cornwall Clan. Once they settled on the spelling in the 1700s, that is. Grylls has done an admirable job of untangling a devil-may-care attitude to spelling that obscures Maria’s family tree. Branwells and Brambles, were they related? Almost certainly, as were Bremells, Brembels, Bremhalls, Brymmells, Brembles, Bromewells and Brummoles.

Some forebears juggled names over a single lifetime, so in 1719 the will was read of Maria’s great-grandfather Martyn Bramwell who had been baptized Bromwell but was Bremble on both his wedding day and at his funeral. Recording names came down to the best guess of the official holding the pen. Though Thomas appears in earlier records as Bramwell, when Maria was baptised on 29 June 1783 her name was fixed as Branwell. When Westcountry worthies could spell their own name, they fared better at keeping it. It was a final permutation that would later echo through the Brontë branch of the family better than, say, Brummole might have done. Maria’s only son would suffer many torments, but that was not among them.

The eighteenth century had been a slog. The family began the march towards wealth and influence as butchers in Market Jew Street, with Maria’s great-grandfather – he of the three surnames – leaving money and property in his will. It was a town of opportunities, as Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe, also a merchant, noted in 1724:

‘This town of Penzance is a place of good business, well built and populous, has a good trade, and a great many ships belonging to it, notwithstanding it is so remote. Here are also a great many good families of gentlemen…’

The Branwells were soon among them. Maria’s granddad Richard was a mason. It was his eldest sons Richard and Thomas, also masons, who really ramped up the family fortunes, branching out into imports, exports, brewing and property. Where there was money to be made, there was a Branwell. The town was a good place for entrepreneurs, according to someone writing to the London Magazine in 1749 as ‘Penzantiensis.’ Not only was it ‘one of the richest, most flourishing’ maritime towns it was not a case of ‘a few overgrown mushrooms’ lording it over ‘inhabitants almost vassals’ like elsewhere, ‘but its wealth is in a great many hands, which constitutes no small part of its happiness.’

Maria also had relatives to be reckoned with on her mother’s side. The Carnes, too, were pillars of the west Cornish community, possibly doing even better than the Branwells in the 1760s when ambitious young Thomas was courting eligible Anne Carne. They too were masons, carpenters, craftsmen and merchants. Anne’s father John was a silversmith and clockmaker. Both families took a close interest in the scientific advances of the eighteenth century. Several Carnes backed the local engineer Jonathan Hornblower, an early pioneer of steam power, appearing on the ‘List of Adventurers concerned in Hornblower’s Engines’ in the 1790s.

When 22-year-old (probably, no baptism can be found) Thomas set his cap at 24-year-old Anne, it was a very suitable match. The families had professional links and lived close to one another. But first things first, could they produce children? It was not unknown for lovers to find out sooner rather than later and tie the knot only when the family line was assured. When Anne arrived at her wedding at Madron Parish Church in November 1768, she was at least four months pregnant with Anne junior. Ambitious and with a finger in every pie, Branwells and Carnes branched through all areas of Cornish life.

Maria may have been born over the family’s large grocery shop known as Branwell’s Corner, between the marketplace and Causewayhead. While so much of eighteenth-century Cornwall struggled with poverty, Penzance thrived thanks in part to its lucrative royal charters. These dated back to one woman whose devotion to putting her town on the map in 1332 paid dividends for centuries. Powerful Alice de Lisle, determined lady (technically, lord) of the manor of Alverton, persuaded Edward III to grant the right to hold markets and fairs in Penzance. Market town status was bolstered by Henry VIII granting permission to charge harbour dues to shipping, on condition the quay was kept in good repair. The status of Penzance Borough was awarded by James I in May 1614. This made the town a corporation that ran its own affairs with a mayor, eight aldermen and twelve councillors known as assistants. Despite Alice de Lisle’s shining example of civic savvy, women were locked out of any such role.

Ringing the commercial hub of the Jacobean market house were dotted the properties and businesses that comprised the wider Branwell empire. Thomas owned pilchard warehouses and properties across town and beyond, including the Golden Lion inn run by his brother Richard. By the late 1700s, Penzance had a population of around 3,000 and a constant flow of visitors. Commerce was queen, with lively markets and fairs bringing people to town to trade their crops, catches and goods. The port brought the fishing fleet, travellers, traders and the military.

Jewel in the commercial crown was the status of Coinage Town for the whole of Penwith, awarded in 1663 by a grateful Charles II for its royalist sympathies during the English Civil War. Miners from across western Cornwall were obliged to take their tin to the Coinage Hall off the marketplace in Penzance to be coined. This was the method of paying dues to the Duke of Cornwall. Officials removed a corner (coin in French) from each big block of tin, stamping it with the duke’s coat of arms if it was considered pure. Blocks were then turned into bars for Mediterranean markets, ingots for the East Indies and the tin trade powered much of the borough’s wealth.

Though often seen as remote and isolated by the rest of eighteenth-century Britain, Maria’s prosperous home town was in reality a hub of regional and international trade. At the heart of it all, Branwells regularly raised their glasses for the Penzance Corporation toast: ‘May the market and pier bring a thousand a year!’

When people were done with the ships and the shops, they went in search of entertainment. Showbiz arrived in Chapel Street with the opening of the first Penzance Theatre in 1787, when Maria was four. Impresario Richard Hughes was known as the father of provincial drama and created the theatre over the stables behind the Ship and Castle (renamed Union Hotel to mark the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801). It could accommodate 500 people around a raked stage complete with trapdoors. The only drawback was the pungent odour from the horses below.

Maria was born when Branwell business was booming and it was high time they had a better address than over the shop. Thomas was a gentleman and could afford a home that reflected his success. He chose a new build in a sought-after location, Rotterdam Buildings at the coastal end of Chapel Street. The three-house terrace with a red brick frontage adorned with fashionable green woodwork had a majestic view out to sea and was built for merchant families of note.

There are two versions of where the handsome Dutch brick came from. Brick houses were rare and either it came ashore thanks to a privateer who acquired it by force at sea or it was salvage, ballast on a Dutch ship bound for America that came to grief on the rocks during a storm in Mount’s Bay. Either way, it gave the smart terrace its local name of Rotterdam Buildings.

As was common in Georgian architecture, more attention was paid to the front of the house than the rear. So the smart red brick was used for the frontage, while parts of the sides and rear were built of local granite. However they found their materials, one of the builders was Thomas’ brother, Richard, and the other Edward Hambleton, related by marriage. They kept it in the family, employing relatives as masons and carpenters.

According to the late house historian Lilian Oldham, who lived there from 1968, these fine Georgian abodes were built for gentleman merchant Thomas Love, who moved into one. The second was taken by Captain Richard Hosking of the merchant navy and the last house by Thomas Branwell between 1783 and 1784. Thomas and Anne probably moved their family from over the grocers when Maria was still a babe-in-arms. Though just a few hundred yards away, the family went up in the world. Tiny Miss Branwell would know only an upmarket and comfortable home at the heart of Penzance society.

Maria shared the nursery under the eaves with Elizabeth and later, with Charlotte. As the adults oversaw the move, Elizabeth joined her older siblings Anne, Margaret, Jane and Benjamin in exploring their new home. The front door had fine granite steps onto the busy street with its endless traffic to and from the harbour. To the rear was a kitchen overlooking a garden leading into St Mary’s churchyard. South-facing, it was sunny and warm in summer but caught the force of the gale when a winter sou’westerly blew in from the Atlantic. Nearby stood a carpenter’s shed and it seems likely that this was where coffins were made for funerals at the chapel.

Rough steps from the kitchen led to a cave-like cellar dug from the rock, not unlike the smuggler tunnels on the other side of the street. A Cornish range with a slate surround had brass rails overhead for drying laundry. There were also two carved wooden racks for holding Thomas’ pistols, always oiled and ready during the intermittent wars with the French.

The toilet was an earth closet at the end of the garden. Unfortunately for children who needed the privy, this was a stone’s throw from the graves. Fortunately, the graveyard was rarely deserted, serving as a sheltered spot for retired sailors sunning themselves on the flat tombstones and a playground for the town children. It served day and night as a shortcut to town.

Inside the new house window seats were perfect for sewing, reading or people watching. Some beams across doorways and windows were made from reclaimed ship timber. Climbing the central staircase, the first floor had bedrooms for the parents and eldest children along with a small dressing room. All rooms had a fireplace, some with integral surfaces known as hob cheeks for resting items to warm.

The youngest children, including Maria, probably slept in the two third floor attic rooms at the top of the house and almost certainly with a servant. One was an L-shaped room with a window looking out onto the length of Chapel Street leading up into town. The other was square, with a bigger window revealing the slender tower of St Mary’s, a whitewashed landmark for sailors, the graveyard and coast beyond. From the chapel every May Day, the sexton would emerge, waking Maria along with the rest of the town by blowing a traditional tin horn at dawn.

The rooms for entertaining and family use were either side of the front door, off the half wood-panelled hallway. The room to the right had an alcove with wooden bookshelves for the family library between the fireplace and window. Both front parlours had a view across the bay to St Michael’s Mount and a constant parade of anyone who was anyone passing their door. The fine new house had all the trappings to be expected of such an address.

The Branwells had arrived.

Though well to do, Maria did not grow up on a country estate or in some rural backwater. Chapel Street linked the sea to the land, fish to the market, cargo to ships, fighting men to Nelson’s navy, adventurers to the next tide. The Branwells were intimately connected with this gateway to the world and in 1785, Maria’s father and uncle Richard were awarded the £1,050 contract to build a new town quay in partnership with another relative, Solomon Cock.

Once a day, the melee in Maria’s street briefly abated for an invasion by at least seventy mules. Gentry, servants and sailors alike stood aside to allow beasts from the mines at St Just to plod down to the ships loaded with copper ore or tin, then plod back bearing coal. This daily parade was the reason Branwell ladies were obliged to wear protective wooden pattens over their shoes. Hundreds of hooves churned Chapel Street into a muddy mess, to say nothing of the dung and the red slime dripping from sacks of ore.

Elizabeth took a pair of pattens to Haworth in 1821 and for the Brontë children the clink-clink on flags was a warning of Aunt Branwell’s approach. As girls in Penzance, however, Maria and Elizabeth were not alone in their practical footwear. A kind of elevated wooden clog, resting on a metal hoop, with leather straps, they were indispensable for any lady stepping out into the town’s main road, no matter what their social position. Maria slipped her small feet into shoes, then strapped on pattens like her mama, sisters and maidservant. Some pattens were ten inches high to guarantee clearing the mud and dung. Thus protected from the mucky streets, they could sally forth to the market.

The most westerly market town in England, Penzance was the place everyone met to buy and sell everything – from an array of seafood (especially abundant pilchards) to livestock, housewares and shoes. A democratic affair, middle class matrons such as Maria’s mother mixed with matelots, miners and farmers, all brought to town to trade goods and gossip from miles around. Every kind of staple and delicacy could be bought, including the clotted cream still unknown outside of Cornwall.

Among the most striking characters Maria encountered on market days were the fishwives who walked the beach road from nei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Daughter of Penzance
• Chapter 2 Perfectly Her Own Mistress
• Chapter 3 The Adventures of Pat Prunty
• Chapter 4 Grove, Actually
• Chapter 5 Saucy Maria
• Chapter 6 Becoming Mrs Brontë
• Chapter 7 Mothering Heights
• Chapter 8 The Resistance
• Chapter 9 Pursued by Death
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1 The Letters of Maria Branwell
• Appendix 2 The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns
• Bibliography
• Plate section