Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy

by Aunt Branwell

  As the two surviving sons of Richard Branwell, Richard junior and Thomas, grew into adulthood so the fortunes of the family grew, but it was the youngest son Thomas in particular who achieved success in the world of commerce. By the time Thomas Bramwell made his will on March 26 1808,8 he had a property portfolio covering much of Penzance, including shops, a warehouse at the quayside, an inn and brewery, and the largest mansion in the town, Tremenheere House9. If these properties had been inherited, rather than earned, then we would have expected them to have been owned by Richard, the older brother, but in fact Thomas was providing Richard with both a job and a home at this time, as the older brother was serving as landlord of Penzance’s Golden Lion Inn, owned by his younger brother.

  Thomas Branwell, as he came to be known with the ‘m’ finally exchanged for an ‘n’, had recognised the potential that the growing town of Penzance offered in the latter half of the eighteenth century, investing in property as well as concentrating on the trade that had been the staple of his family for generation after generation. For a man now rising in society, and growing in wealth and influence as well, there was one thing above all else that was expected of him; to marry and raise a family who would continue to expand the Branwell legacy after he had gone.

  With marriage in mind, Thomas was likely to have been encouraged to take the same step that his father had and marry a woman from another of the leading families in Penzance. The woman he chose certainly fitted this description; two years his senior, Anne Carne was the daughter of John and Anne Carne. The Carnes were a large and well-respected family in Penzance, known both for their piety and for their financial acumen. In later years, they were at the forefront of the religious revival taking place in western Cornwall, and the family were also banking pioneers who opened the town’s Batten, Carne & Carne Bank in 1797.

  Thomas Branwell and Anne Carne married in 1768 in the same Madron church that had seen Thomas’ parents Richard and Margaret take their vows twenty-six years earlier. We can conjecture that Thomas and Ann enjoyed a happy marriage, as it was certainly a fruitful one. Over a twenty-year period, they had twelve children together, but like many families in the late-eighteenth century they experienced tragedies as well as moments of happiness and triumph. Doubtless they would have looked to their sons to carry their name forward into the world, just as Patrick and Maria Brontë would later do with their only son, but only one of the Branwell’s three sons survived infancy. Little could they have known that it would be two of their daughters who would give their family an immortal legacy, and still less could they have known that in 1975 a plaque would be unveiled at the house they lived in at Chapel Street, Penzance. It reads:

  ‘This was the home of Maria and Elizabeth Branwell, the mother and aunt of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë.’

  Chapter 3

  Fairly Spread Thy Early Sail

  ‘Sometimes I seem to see thee rise,

  A glorious child again -

  All virtues beaming from thine eyes,

  That ever honoured men -

  Courage and Truth, a generous breast,

  Where Love and Gladness lay;

  A being whose very Memory blest,

  And made the mourner gay -

  O, fairly spread thy early sail,

  And fresh and pure and free,

  Was the first impulse of the gale,

  That urged life’s wave for thee!’

  Emily Brontë, E.W. to A.G.A.

  The town of Penzance grew in size and prosperity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, although the majority of the population didn’t notice much difference in their day-to-day existence. Life as a fisherman or a tin miner was tough and dangerous, bringing with it little security; under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that some of the townsfolk, and those who had been drawn to Penzance in search of a better life, entered into criminal activities from time to time, from the ‘wreckers’ who would scavenge for goods whenever shipwrecks occurred, to smugglers who took a more proactive approach to the liberation of property and avoidance of tax.

  These concerns occupied the thoughts of Thomas Branwell from a moral point of view, but he was free from the financial worries and uncertainty that beset most of the townsfolk. Tradesmen and merchants such as he were presented with a growing number of opportunities, and they also operated in an atmosphere of fraternity and friendship. Trades were passed on from generation to generation, and families married into other families of a similar social standing, cementing further the bonds that united those in the town’s business community.

  Thomas and Ann had many friends in Penzance and the surrounding area, people whose occupations were butchers, grocers, tea merchants, fish traders, teachers and clergymen. One family well-known to the Branwells were the Tonkins, who lived in Sennen, nine miles to the west, near Land’s End. The head of the family, Charles, was a grocer and flour dealer in Penzance, but his children were of a more artistic bent, reflecting the cultural flourishing of the town at the time. His daughter was an acclaimed singer and his sons were musicians, but of most interest is his son James Tonkin, who was born in 1757. As well as being a pianist, James was also a fine artist, painting Cornish landscapes1 as well as miniature portraits of his friends and acquaintances.

  In 1799, James Tonkin painted two individual portraits of Thomas and Anne Branwell, the only confirmed pictures of the parents of Maria and Elizabeth Branwell, and the grandparents of the Brontës. They were then in their mid-fifties. Anne is round-faced and serious, sporting a large white cap with a black ribbon around it and enveloped in a black shawl – the black possibly being a sign of mourning for the loss of her second daughter Margaret, who died in that year. Thomas cuts a very different figure. His stovepipe hat and voluminous neck scarf (the kind that came to be known as a ‘Wellington’ and that was invariably sported by Patrick Brontë) make him look an archetypal Georgian era gentleman, which is exactly what he was. One thing seems certain when you look at the Branwell portraits, these are a successful couple, a man and woman of substance.

  Also noticeable about Thomas Branwell is his long aquiline nose and the faint hint of a smile upon his face. There is certainly a family resemblance to the face on the portrait we have of Maria Brontë, and there is also a similarity to the watercolour portrait of a 13-year-old Anne Brontë, painted by her sister Charlotte. Tonkins painted a series of tiny oval framed portraits of the two branches of the Branwell family in 1799. They are now owned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and we have this excellent description of Elizabeth’s portrait dating from the year 1937:

  ‘In 1799 Elizabeth was 23 years of age. Her miniature shows a girl with soft brown hair, pale brown eyes, and a serious expression. She wears a pretty white dress with a posy of blue flowers at her breast. She resembles her father and sister Maria, rather than her mother2.’

  There is also a charming silhouette of Elizabeth in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in which she is clearly wearing a hat and neck ruff very similar to that worn by her mother Anne in her 1799 portrait.

  By the time of Thomas’ wedding to Anne he had already begun to acquire wealth and property, and his will gives an indication of just how much he possessed by the time he set it down in 1808. We find the aforementioned Golden Lion Inn, being run for him by his older brother – perhaps a strange source of income for a man who had become a devout follower of the Methodist cause that avowed temperance. We also find a fish cellar at the Penzance quay, showing how Thomas had diversified from his family trade of butcher. He owned a malt house at Causeway Head, two houses on Chapel Street, Penzance, along with three other houses in the town, and further houses and land in Leskudjac and Leskinnick3.

  There can be little doubt that Elizabeth Branwell was proud of the success of her parents, and the comfortable childhood that it allowed her to experience, and she related tales of her youth, the opulent balls and social whirl of Penzance society, to her nephew and nieces. This must have seemed a very differen
t world to the Brontë children growing up in a much less luxurious lifestyle on the edge of wind-blasted moors, until in their young minds they magnified still further the wealth and importance of the Cornish grandparents they never had a chance to know.

  We get a glimpse of this in the opening to Anne Brontë’s first novel Agnes Grey. It is a beautiful work of fiction, but it also contains elements that are largely autobiographical; the eponymous heroine is after all a governess who is the daughter of a clergyman in the north of England. Anne, as Agnes, describes how Reverend Grey wed a woman of a much higher social status who made a great sacrifice when marrying him:

  ‘My mother, who married him against the wishes of her friends, was a squire’s daughter, and a woman of spirit. In vain it was represented to her, that if she became a poor parson’s wife, she must relinquish her carriage and her lady’s-maid, and all the luxuries and elegance of affluence4.’

  Here we see how Elizabeth’s tales of the mother who died when Anne was an infant, and of this mother’s own parents, became deeply rooted in Anne’s mind and over time became amplified. Nevertheless, given their social standing and wealth, it is certain that Thomas and Anne Branwell would have employed a number of servants, and travelled by carriage. Thomas, of course, was from merchant stock and far removed from a country squire, but in 1788, two years before the death of his father Richard, he did take a step up the social ladder when he was made a town councillor5.

  Happily married, with financial security already in place and a bright future seemingly in front of them, there was only one other thing a late-eighteenth century couple needed; a family. It was a day of celebration, therefore, when Anne Branwell gave birth to her first child in 1769, just a year after they were married. It was a healthy, happy daughter and as was customary at the time, and as was repeated by Maria and Patrick Brontë in the succeeding generation, she was given her mother’s name.

  As their daughter Anne grew up, her parents must have wondered what the future would hold for her. As a daughter she would not be expected to inherit the Branwell estate (although we shall see how Thomas Branwell was more enlightened than many men of his time in this respect), and nor would she be expected to become a businesswoman in her own right. It would instead be envisaged that she would marry into one of the leading families in the town, perhaps a Carne, a John, a Giddy or a Davy, as her mother had done. They would also have expected their eldest daughter to have taken a role in raising the siblings that would come after her, if she was fortunate enough to make it out of childhood herself.

  The early days of Anne’s life must have been of particular concern to her parents, as while life expectancy in Cornwall in the late-eighteenth century was around 28 years of age6, this figure was skewed by two factors – the extremely hazardous nature of tin and copper mining, and the high infant mortality rate. While the Branwell children were immune to the first factor, deaths of children and infants affected families of all classes – as the Branwells would all too soon discover.

  Disease was rampant across the south west of England, with outbreaks of typhus, whooping cough and cholera sweeping across Cornwall at regular intervals, removing the old, infirm and young alike. Whilst we do not have official infant mortality figures for Cornwall at this time, the official figures for Haworth in Yorkshire in the middle of the nineteenth century make shocking reading, with 41.6 per cent of the population dying before they reached their sixth birthday7. Whilst Haworth was famously unhealthy, largely due to its poor sanitation, it is likely that infant death rates were also high in the Penzance of the previous century. Children in Penzance such as the young Branwells also had an extra threat – the sea. Death by drowning was a reality that many Cornish families had to deal with, not only because of fishermen lost at sea but also because of inquisitive youngsters swept away by sudden waves or cut off by an incoming tide.

  The ferocity of the waters around Cornwall reached a head at two o’clock in the afternoon on 1 November 1855, when Penzance was hit by a tsunami. The devastating waves were caused by a huge earthquake that had struck Lisbon in Portugal, some eight hundred miles to the south, earlier that day, and contemporary reports indicate that there was considerable damage to Penzance and the surrounding villages, as well as a significant, although not officially quantified, loss of life. One eye-witness account was given by Reverend William Borlase, a keen amateur scientist and geologist:

  ‘The first and second refluxes were not so violent as the 3rd and 4th (tsunami waves) at which time the sea was as rapid as that of a mill-stream descending to an undershot wheel and the rebounds of the sea continued in their full fury for fully 2 hours8.’

  Thomas and Anne, then nine and eleven respectively, must have watched this event with a mixture of terror and awe, similar to that experienced by their grandchildren, Anne, Branwell and Emily Brontë 69 years later when they themselves were nearly enveloped by a seven foot high torrent of mud after an explosion known as a bog burst on the Haworth moorland they were walking through. A local newspaper reported how the explosion could be heard for miles around and also reveals how close it came to claiming the lives of the young Brontës:

  ‘Somebody gave alarm, and thereby saved the lives of some children who would otherwise have been swept away9.’

  As Elizabeth Branwell witnessed, with great relief, her nephew and nieces return bedraggled, but safe, to the parsonage on that day in September 1824, her mind must surely have gone back to the stories her parents had told her about the Cornish tsunami, an event that could have seen them swept away too.

  In 1770, a year after the birth of Anne, Thomas and Anne Branwell had their second child, another daughter whom they christened Margaret after her grandmother. Like Anne, Margaret Branwell was a healthy child and grew into adulthood (although she died at the age of 29, just as her niece Anne Bronte would do,) but a double tragedy was about to strike the Branwells of Penzance.

  1771 saw the birth of their first son, named Thomas after his father, and this was a day of joy and celebration. The two daughters, Anne and Margaret, were loved in their own rights, but here was the son who would become the man to take the Branwell name and businesses into the next century. Alas, it was not to be, and Thomas died within a year. By the time of Thomas Branwell’s infant death his mother Anne was pregnant again, and in 1772 her third daughter Elizabeth was born. This is not, however, the Elizabeth Branwell who is remembered by the plaque on Chapel Street in Penzance and not the Elizabeth Branwell who would go on to have so much influence upon the Brontë sisters and their work; no, this Elizabeth Branwell, like her brother Thomas before her, died in infancy in February 1776, at three years old.

  Although child mortality was much more common at this time than it is today, and something that most parents experienced at some point, we should not imagine that this made such deaths any less sorrowful, or that it assuaged the grief or feelings of guilt of the parents. Nevertheless, the family of Thomas and Anne Branwell continued to grow. In 1773, another daughter, Jane, arrived and in 1775 she gained a brother named Benjamin. Benjamin was to be the only son of Thomas and Anne who would see adulthood (although he would later, all too briefly, have a brother Thomas who shared the sad fate of his sibling who bore the same name), and he carried the family name with pride, creating his own wealth and obtaining a position at the head of Penzance society. Jane Branwell was destined for a very different kind of life, one where hope was quickly followed by disappointment and sorrow, but it is from her sad story that the Branwell line continues to this day.

  As the years passed, the Branwell family continued to grow, and in late November 1776, their seventh child was born; another daughter, they gave her the name borne by the sister who had died just nine months before – this was the Elizabeth Branwell who would one day leave Cornwall for Yorkshire to become a second mother to six needy children and in so doing change the course of literary history.

  Elizabeth was baptised at St Maddern’s church in Madron on the second of December. Her
father was by this time a wealthy and highly respected man, and the leading figures from Penzance and the surrounding towns and villages were in attendance. It was a solemn ceremony conducted in accordance with the traditions of the Church of England, even though her parents were by then supporters of the Wesleyan cause that was growing rapidly in popularity in Cornwall.

  Alongside the essential act of a church baptism there was one other rite that the baby Elizabeth had to go through, and it took place not far from St Maddern’s church. This was an ancient, and rather strange, ceremony, but one that was still adhered to by families of the region for fear of what could happen otherwise. Around a mile north of Madron’s church is a wishing well, today unremarkable and difficult to find, that draws up spring water. In May, traditionally the month of Mary mother of Jesus and therefore particularly auspicious, infants were brought to the well and, naked, were gently lowered into the water until fully immersed as if undergoing a second baptism. After being bathed in Madron Well it was believed that the child was blessed with protection against natural diseases, and just as importantly they would be given holy protection against the evil eye and the unseen yet deadly forces of witchcraft10.

  Now safely baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and given the added protection of the waters of Madron Well, Elizabeth Branwell was ready to begin her adventure in life. It was a life that would turn out very differently to how she, or any of her family, could have envisaged it, and yet always at its heart was one word; family. Growing up, she looked up particularly to her eldest sister Anne, seven years her senior. It was Anne who would read bedtime stories to her, Anne who showed her the delights of Penzance, and later Anne who introduced her into Penzance society with all its delights. This role, elder sister, educator, advisor, confidante and best friend, was one that Elizabeth herself would later carry out with great aplomb for her younger sisters Maria and Charlotte.