Extracted from the Principal Registry of the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice.
Being of sound mind and judgment, in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Patrick Brontë, B.A., Incumbent of Haworth, in the Parish of Bradford and county of York, make this my last Will and Testament: I leave forty pounds to be equally divided amongst all my brothers and sisters to whom I gave considerable sums in times past; And I direct the same sum of forty pounds to be sent for distribution to Mr. Hugh Brontë, Ballinasceaugh, near Loughbrickland, Ireland; I leave thirty pounds to my servant, Martha Brown, as a token of regard for long and faithful services to me and my children; To my beloved and esteemed son-in-law, the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, B.A., I leave and bequeath the residue of my personal estate of every description which I shall be possessed of at my death for his own absolute benefit; And I make him my sole executor; And I revoke all former and other Wills, in witness whereof I, the said Patrick Brontë, have to this my last Will, contained in this sheet of paper, set my hand this twentieth day of June, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-five.
Patrick Brontë.—Signed and acknowledged by the said Patrick Brontë as his Will in the presence of us present at the same time, and who in his presence and in the presence of each other have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses: Joseph Redman, Eliza Brown.
The Irish relatives are not forgotten, and indeed this will gives the most direct evidence of the fact that for the sixty years that he had been absent from his native land he had always kept his own country, or at least his relatives in County Down, sufficiently in mind.
CHAPTER II: CHILDHOOD
Eighty years have passed over Thornton since that village had the honour of becoming the birthplace of Charlotte Brontë. The visitor of to-day will find the Bell Chapel, in which Mr. Brontë officiated, a mere ruin, and the font in which his children were baptized ruthlessly exposed to the winds of heaven. [56a] The house in which Patrick Brontë resided is now a butcher’s shop, and indeed little, one imagines, remains the same. But within the new church one may still overhaul the registers, and find, with but little trouble, a record of the baptism of the Brontë children. There, amid the names of the rough and rude peasantry of the neighbourhood, we find the accompanying entries, [56b] differing from their neighbours only by the fact that Mr. Morgan or Mr. Fennell came to the help of their relatives and officiated in place of Mr. Brontë. Mr. Brontë, it will be observed, had already received his appointment to Haworth when Anne was baptized.
There were, it is well known, two elder children, Maria and Elizabeth, born at Hartshead, and doomed to die speedily at Haworth. A vague memory of Maria lives in the Helen Burns of Jane Eyre, but the only tangible records of the pair, as far as I am able to ascertain, are a couple of samplers, of the kind which Mrs. Brontë and her sisters had worked at Penzance a generation earlier.
Maria Brontë finished this Sampler on the 16th of May at the age of eight years
one of them tells us, and the other:
Elizabeth Brontë finished this Sampler the 27th of July at the age of seven years.
Maria died at the age of twelve in May 1825, and Elizabeth in June of the same year, at the age of eleven. It is, however, with their three sisters that we have most concern, although all the six children accompanied their parents to Haworth in 1820.