Brontës (8 page)

When Patrick arrived in Wellington, early in January 1809, the parish was just celebrating the wedding of the son of Thomas Eyton, the local squire, who lived at Eyton Hall, with the distribution of food and money to the poor at his expense.
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Despite its burgeoning industry, Wellington was still very much dominated by its squirearchical family and, as was traditional, Thomas Eyton had presented his third son, John, to the living of the parish, which was in his gift.
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John Eyton, however, was no ordinary gentleman parson. Like his new curate, Eyton had been to St John's College, Cambridge; though three years younger than Patrick, he had graduated in 1799 and gained his Master of Arts degree in 1802, so their university careers had not coincided. At Cambridge Eyton had fallen under the all-pervasive influence of Charles Simeon, converted to Evangelical precepts and abandoned his previously gay and fashionable way of life. In 1802 he became vicar of the joint parishes of Wellington and Eyton on the Weald Moors and promptly alienated many of his closest relatives and friends by the zeal with which he prosecuted the Evangelical cause. He rapidly made a name for himself as a powerful preacher and conscientious pastor, regularly visiting the sick and the poor. He was also personally responsible for turning the Wellington Free School into a model of its kind, bringing education to poor children long before the establishment of the National School Society. By the time Patrick arrived in Wellington, John Eyton was already renowned as a man of piety who had had at least one sermon published and was to have two volumes of them collected and published after his death.
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Though Patrick had much to learn from his new vicar, there was an immediate bond of shared Evangelical conviction and university experience between them. Eyton made him welcome and, according to local tradition, provided him with lodgings in his own rather
splendid Georgian vicarage, which was set in the fields off the turnpike road leading to Shrewsbury.
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All Saints' Church, like Wellington itself, was totally different from anything Patrick had known before. A modern building, less than twenty years old, it looked externally more like assembly rooms or a chapel than a Church of England church. It had an elegant grey stone façade, with regular rows of huge, plain rectangular windows, surmounted by smaller arched windows; its only conventional church features were the clock and bell tower, set just behind the classical frontage, and the graveyard in front. Inside, it was light and airy, with a gallery to three sides held up by iron pillars cast at Coalbrookdale – an innovatory use of iron which was highly appropriate to the area.
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With a population of 8,000 people scattered over a wide area of countryside around the town, church business was brisk and Patrick would have found his time considerably more taken up with formal duties than at Wethersfield. This was particularly the case as John Eyton's health was already beginning to fail. Frequently he was unable to take any duty at all and even on the occasions when he attempted to conduct some part of the service, he would often be obliged to desist and hand over to his curate.
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For this reason he employed not one, but two curates in his populous parishes. In the single year that Patrick spent at All Saints', there were 164 burials and 271 baptisms. As the registers were kept by the parish clerk and did not give the acting minister's name, it is impossible to tell at what proportion of these services Patrick personally officiated. From the marriage register, however, where the minister himself filled in the details, we can see that out of the fifty marriages performed throughout 1809, nearly half were performed by Patrick who, in the press of business, had begun to adopt a more hurried accent in the spelling of his name.
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Though All Saints' dominated parish life, there were also duties to take at the tiny red brick church of St Catherine at Eyton on the Weald Moors. Built in 1743 as a chapel of ease, and practically engulfed by the barns and farmyards of the prosperous farm next door, the little church served a population of nearly 400 souls. The duties here were obviously much lighter and seem mainly to have been taken by the other, more senior curate, though on 25 May Patrick, together with the churchwarden and overseer of the poor, made and signed an assessment for the relief of the poor in the parish of Eyton.
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There were other clerical duties throughout the year. Wednesday,
8 February, had been set aside as a day of national fast and humiliation; these expressions of public mortification were held irregularly throughout Patrick's career as a response to moments of national crisis. Shops and mills were shut, special services were held in churches and personal penitence was expected to be observed; it was hoped that public contrition for the sinful state of the nation would appease God's wrath and avert the danger. On i June there was an important meeting at Wellington of all the contributors to the fund for the relief of clergymen's widows and orphans in the archdeaconry of Salop to host and organize; and on 11 June the annual sermons for the benefit of the Sunday schools at Wellington were preached by the Reverend Mr Waltham of Darlaston in Staffordshire, raising the enormous sum of £72 14s. 7½d. in collections.
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Undoubtedly the most memorable event, though, was the celebration on 25 October of the fiftieth anniversary of George III's accession. In Shrewsbury, John Nunn preached a sermon on the text ‘Let the king live for ever' to the mayor and aldermen of the town and bonfires on all the hills in the area, including the Wrekin, were clearly visible.
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In Wellington, the inhabitants were ‘second to none in manifestions of loyalty and temperate joy'. Every house was brilliantly illuminated, the poorer inhabitants being generously supplied with candles for the purpose by Thomas Eyton; the squire's own house was resplendent with the motto ‘Fear God Honor [sic] the King' formed out of variegated lamps. In addition to the Wrekin bonfire, there was a display of fireworks and a commemorative subscription raised enough money to buy four oxen, the meat being distributed among the poor. Not to be outdone by his father, the Reverend John Eyton committed himself to the establishment of a Lancasterian school at Ketley as a permanent memorial of the jubilee.
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The increased scale and scope of Patrick's duties at Wellington would have provided a much-needed distraction from his personal unhappiness. So, too, would his burgeoning friendships in the unusually close-knit clerical community of Shropshire. His old college friend, John Nunn, was only ten miles away, a distance short enough to walk along the banks of the slow, wide Severn though there were several coaches a day, if he could afford the fare. Patrick must have visited him many times, for he made other friends in Shrewsbury too. There was Nunn's vicar, Thomas Stedman, an Oxford man, who had been at St Chad's since 1783.
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It was during his incumbency that the church had been completely destroyed when its tower fell on to the nave. Stedman was responsible for the quite remarkable new church which
replaced it, designed by the same George Steuart who had built All Saints' at Wellington and very similar to it in style, apart from its one aberration, the largest circular nave, at one hundred feet in diameter, in England. Stedman, like John Eyton, was also a writer, the author of several tracts and sermons and editor of the letters of Orton and Stonehouse.
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Another literary friend from Shrewsbury was Charles Hulbert, the antiquarian and historian of Shropshire, whose house Patrick visited regularly. Hulbert was a man of many parts; originally from Manchester he had set up Shrewsbury's one and only cotton factory in 1803 but he was also a Methodist Circuit Steward, a preacher on the Shrewsbury circuit which included Wellington.
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Hulbert must have been one of the first of Patrick's many Methodist friends. Another, whose friendship was to help shape Patrick's future, was John Fennell, master of the day school at Wellington. Though he was later to choose ordination into the Established Church, Fennell, like so many of the clergymen in this area, was also a follower of the Wesleys.
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The closest, if perhaps not the most important, of Patrick's new friends was his fellow curate at All Saints', William Morgan. A Welshman, and five years younger than Patrick, he had been at All Saints' since 1806. The two men shared more than their duties, both being ambitious and enthusiastic by temperament and intensely committed to their faith. Morgan was also a friend of Hulbert and Fennell, later marrying the latter's daughter. He introduced Patrick to many new friends, including Samuel Walter, the curate whose place Patrick had taken on his promotion to Madeley, some six miles away.
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Madeley, though undistinguished as a town, was a place of immense spiritual significance, the inspirational source and guiding light which bound together all these men and profoundly affected their lives. It was the home of the aged widow of John Fletcher,
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the great charismatic preacher who had been vicar of Madeley from 1760 till his death in 1785. Born John William de la Flechère at Nyon in Switzerland in 1729, he had spent most of his adult life in England. Among the hard-drinking and often violent workers in the collieries and ironworks around Madeley he had become a byword for saintly personal piety. He was fearless in his denunciation of sin, assiduous in his itinerant preaching and so generous in his charity that his household frequently found itself without either money or food. An intimate friend of both John and Charles Wesley, he was the author of a number of books and tracts which had had an enormous impact on the
Evangelicals and the Methodists alike. With his insistence on the need for conversion to faith, his rebuttal of the Calvinistic doctrine of the Elect and his affection for St Paul, Fletcher became the model and inspiration for the many young clergymen, including Patrick, who converged on his home.

In 1781, only four years before his death, he married the woman he had loved for many years, Mary Bosanquet. As his widow, she faithfully continued his work long after his death and still held open house for all the many disciples to whom he had been such an inspiration. Like him, she worked hard to secure committed Evangelicals for the northern counties of England, where the growth in population consequent upon the Industrial Revolution, much of it in new towns outside the old centres of population, had far outstripped the number of churches established there and where, therefore, there was a crying need for ministers.

At John Fletcher's house, and in his widow's company, Patrick found comfort and encouragement for his professed purpose in life. He met other like-minded men, such as Joshua Gilpin, vicar of Wrockwardine, the pretty red sandstone village less than two miles from Wellington. Gilpin was a devoted follower of Fletcher, had lived in his house before his own ordination and been present at the great man's deathbed. He had translated from its original French and published in two volumes John Fletcher's treatise
The Portrait of St Paul,
appending his own account of the life of its author and, when Patrick met him, was working on a new edition of John Bunyan's
The Pilgrim's Progress
.
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Patrick's own vicar, John Eyton, who had introduced William Morgan to Mary Fletcher, was a frequent visitor, as were Samuel Walter, Eyton's former curate, and John Fennell, the schoolmaster who was also John Fletcher's godson.
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It is possible, too, that Patrick met at Madeley Mary Fletcher's lifelong friend, John Crosse, who had been vicar of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, since 1784. Patrick later told William Morgan, when the latter was writing his biography of Crosse, that he considered ‘Mr C[rosse] and Mrs F [letcher] as very similar to each other in their Christian simplicity, zeal, and manner of speaking to their friends, on the leading subjects of religion'.
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John Crosse, like so many of this circle, was firmly attached to the Arminian school of theology and a strong supporter of John Wesley, whom he had allowed to preach from his own pulpit. After the Methodists had withdrawn from the Church of England and become a separate sect in 1812, he actually considered resigning his living and joining them as a minister,
only being dissuaded on the grounds that his usefulness would be greater as vicar of Bradford.
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‘Usefulness' was the watch-word of the Evangelicals, implying activity and commitment, and it is significant that as early as 1804 Patrick had similarly been marked out as someone who had a ‘desire for usefulness in the ministry'.
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Patrick was entirely at home in this atmosphere and as long as he lived, even after the Methodists had separated from the Church of England and it was no longer fashionable or even really acceptable to support them, he continued to maintain cordial relations with Methodists in general and Wesleyans in particular. After the emotional traumas of having to give up Mary Burder, it was no doubt a relief to find spiritual comfort and support in the Madeley circle.

Through his contacts here, if not from John Crosse himself, Patrick learnt that Bradford was one of the fastest growing parishes in terms of population and one of the least well served in terms of clergymen in the country. He had always wanted to live and work in Yorkshire,
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which was regarded by the Evangelicals as a sort of ‘Promised Land' of opportunity: the Bradford area now became an obvious and attractive choice. The first vacancy there that was brought to his attention was the post of curate in Dewsbury, an industrial town near Bradford. The vicar of Dewsbury, John Buckworth, was not yet the semi-permanent invalid he later became but, like John Eyton, his health was already suffering from the zeal with which he carried out his duties and he was in desperate need of support. He was anxious to secure someone committed to Evangelical beliefs and Patrick was therefore offered, and accepted, a post as his assistant.
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