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Sir,—Having an earnest desire to enter as a probationary student in the Royal Academy, but not being possessed of information as to the means of obtaining my desire, I presume to request from you, as Secretary to the Institution, an answer to the questions –

Where am I to present my drawings?

At what time?

and especially

Can I do it in August or September?

This draft of a letter is scribbled on the back of a piece of paper containing three poetical fragments. There is no date, and it is impossible to say whether a final letter was written and sent. Two clues show that the time must have been the early summer of 1835. The first of them is a letter from Charlotte to her friend Ellen Nussey, dated July 2nd of that year, saying that she was to return to Roe Head as a teacher, taking Emily with her as a pupil, and that Branwell was to go to London, where it was hoped that he would be placed at the Royal Academy. The second clue is a letter from Mr Brontë four days later, written to his old friend Mrs Franks of Huddersfield, telling her that ‘It is my design to send my son to the Royal Academy for Artists in London’.

Two months later, Branwell would appear not yet to have left for London, for on September 7th his father wrote to the drawing-master at Leeds, Mr Robinson, thanking him for his ‘great kindness towards my son’, and continuing, ‘if all be well, Branwell hopes to be with you on Friday next, in order to finish his course of lessons.’

Branwell most likely did exactly this; went to Leeds, took his last lesson—as he thought—and set out for London and the Royal Academy. The rest is mystery. Whether Branwell submitted his drawings, whether they were not advanced enough for him to be admitted as a pupil, has never been discovered: no letters on the subject exist in the archives of the Royal Academy.

Branwell’s only expenses would have been his board and lodging, and inquiries must have been made about this before setting forth for London. Tuition was then, as it is today, entirely free, for the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy pay for the drawing school. Students are accepted on merit. They are obliged to show some ten works of their own choice, and drawings ‘from life’ should be included. The standard was, and always has been, high. All these facts Mr Robinson would himself have known. He is unlikely to have allowed a pupil of his to submit drawings unless he was sanguine about his success.

Charlotte’s letters from Roe Head to her friend Ellen Nussey never speak again of Branwell’s possible tuition at the Royal Academy, and Miss Nussey herself, years later, when questioned by Mrs Gaskell, said, ‘I do not know whether it was conduct or want of finances that prevented Branwell from going to the Royal Academy. Probably there were impediments of both kinds.’

Branwell himself had turned eighteen. He was not shy like his sisters. He had plenty of self-confidence. Earlier that summer he had been secretary to the local Conservative Committee during a contested election for the West Riding of Yorkshire, the two opponents being John Stuart-Wortley, 2nd Baron Wharncliffe, and Viscount Morpeth, and he appears to have impressed everyone with his powers of conversation, and—an additional asset in committee work, perhaps—the ability to write with both hands at the same time.

Branwell undoubtedly went to London; but whether he was escorted by his father, by Mr Robinson, or by John Brown, who was now sexton at St Michael’s, Haworth, and at thirty-one was becoming a man of some importance in the small community, remains unknown. Mr Robinson would seem to be the most likely. The art teacher would have known that Joseph Leyland was living in London at that time, lodging with William Geller, the mezzotint engraver, hard at work on his life-sized statue of ‘Kilmeny’, the sinless maid of whose fate Branwell and his sisters must have read a hundred times in James Hogg’s famous Queen’s Wake. Leyland, too, admired James Hogg, and had been inspired by the spotless maid who walked out one day and fell asleep, awaking in a land where no rain fell and no wind blew,

a land of vision, it would seem,

a still, an everlasting stream,

a country of the spirits, who kept her seven years, until she begged to be allowed home once more, to warn her people of what would befall them, how their fair cities would burn and their streets run blood. The knowledge that Leyland was in London would have been enough to draw Branwell there, in excitement at the thought that ‘the fair Kilmeny’ could be cast in plaster as well as the head of Satan.

There is the evidence of one man, happening to be in London at that time, who was said to have seen Branwell Brontë at the Castle Tavern, Holborn. This gentleman, called Woolven, later a ticket collector on the Leeds and Manchester Railway, said that he met Branwell for the first time at the tavern, apparently alone, and was much impressed by the boy’s ‘unusual flow of language and strength of memory’; so much so that ‘the spectators made him umpire in some dispute arising about the dates of certain celebrated battles’.

No word, though, about what had happened at the Royal Academy…

Branwell himself, writing The Adventures of Charles Wentworth nearly a year later, on May 28th, 1836, has this to say:

It was a bright and balmy May morning, so throwing himself back on the seat, he was shortly swept away in a world of thinking, the text of his ideas being that all this stirring expedity to the mightiest city of the world, where he was to begin real life, had not created one half or one quarter the excitement and pleasure he had always fancied in it. Now this, he thought, was always looked to by me as one of my greatest fountains of happiness, and when I found the stream of pleasure running drier and drier I comforted myself with the idea that as I approached twenty-one I was nearing the great spring where all my thirst would be gratified. But what is it which for a year or two has been whispering in my ear—Happiness consists in Anticipation…

Next, he recollected what his advisors had told him, when they saw him, in expectation of an ample fortune falling into his arms, give himself up to idleness and go about doing nothing and caring nothing but building air castles for the adornment of his future life.

‘Now,’ they said, ‘you can never have real happiness without working for it. Exertion is the nutshell which holds pleasure, crack it, and it can be found. Otherwise never. Again, the harder the shell, the better the nut.’

My first argument leads me to the conclusion that I shall have nothing to reward my exertion. Then why should I labour? There are plenty of paths in this life. Which shall I take? Only they all require walking to get on them. But I have it now. Life is a downward journey; all concur in saying it carries us downhill.

Therefore, as men move on in life they are always tending there. And I cannot remain on the summit of childhood, for time comes wafting past, seizes my hand, and hurries me along, whether I will or not. I’ll go across life sideways and never down.

And later:

All day Wentworth had been walking about objectless, but given up to impressions made from passing scenes, never staying to eat or drink nor attending to personal appearance, but with a wildish dejected look of poverty-stricken abstraction. His mind was too restless to stop and fully examine anything. He was going about striking sparks from his mind. He felt that want, that restless uneasy feeling with which rest is torment, and ease begets stupor. The flashes of feeling which were constantly scintillating thrilled his soul, and he cared and thought of nothing more.

Before him stretched docks, and shipping, and merchandise, and the blue boundless sea…

Did Branwell Brontë fail to pass into the Royal Academy schools; or did the ‘flashes of feeling’ and the ‘restlessness’ which beset Charles Wentworth herald, in the eighteen-year-old boy, an attack of epilepsy?

There was silence for ever more in Haworth about Branwell’s visit to London.

In December of that same year the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine received an impassioned letter from a correspondent in Haworth saying: ‘Sir, Read what I write. And would to heaven you could believe it true, for then you would attend and act upon it. I have addressed you twice before, and now I do it again.’ The writer went on to praise James Hogg, who had died earlier in the year and John Wilson, explaining how as a child ‘Blackwood’s had formed his chief delight’, and that he felt ‘no child before enjoyed reading as he did, because none ever had such works as The Noctes, Christmas Dreams, Christopher in his Sporting Jacket to read.’ He continued:

Now, sir, to you I appear writing with conceited assurance; but I am not; for that I know myself so far as to believe in my own originality; and on that ground I desire of you admittance into your ranks. And do not wonder that I apply so determinedly; for the remembrances I spoke of have fixed you and your Magazine in such a manner upon my mind that the idea of striving to aid another periodical is horribly repulsive. My resolution is to devote my ability to you, and for God’s sake, till you see whether or not I can serve you, do not so coldly refuse my aid. All sir, that I desire of you is—that you would in answer to this letter request a specimen or specimens of my writing, and I even wish that you would name the subject on which you would wish me to write.

Had the writer ended his letter then, perhaps he would have had a reply. But the last paragraph must have proved his undoing.

Now, sir, do not act like a commonplace person, but like a man willing to examine for himself. Do not turn from the naked truth of my letters, but prove me—and if I do not stand the proof, I will not further press myself upon you. If I do stand it—why—You have lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you you may gain one in

Patrick Branwell Brontë.

The letter was thought amusing enough to file in the archives of Blackwood’s, but not to answer.

The Royal Academy was barred to Branwell. Blackwood’s did not want him as a contributor. There was nothing for it but to continue the history of Angria, and fill page after page with second-rate verse.

One consolation to bruised pride was that Emily, now seventeen and the tallest of the family, with ‘the eyes of a half-tamed creature’, had been so shaken by school regulations and lack of privacy that she had not endured Roe Head for more than three months. Anne had taken her place, and Emily was now back at home to share the days with Branwell. They read and discussed the more horrifying tales of James Hogg, where ghosts arose from the grave to become brides of mortal men, doctors discovered elixirs of love and charmed not only men and women but bulls as well, and the Baron St Gio, the man without a conscience, murdered an heiress and her family, whose bleeding bodies a stable-lad threw into a ditch.

Charlotte had never cared for the more lugubrious side of Hogg, but it was chosen fare for Emily, and as she and Branwell walked over the moors—for she was a great walker, and jumped the bogs and ditches without caring how wet she became—they would vie with one another as to who could produce the more fearful fantasy, the more desperate character, each one bearing a resemblance, of course, to some real person in the neighbouring farms—old Jonas Sunderland, perhaps, up at Top Withens, who worked a hand-loom with his wife, or Jonas Pickles, who lived at the Heights with his three daughters, and once kept thieves with blackened faces at bay for two hours with a hatchet.

They came to know every inch of Haworth and Stanbury Moors, during these months when Charlotte and Anne were at school, sometimes walking as far west as Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall, or north across Jackson’s Ridge to Wycoller. Each lonely farmstead would hold a story—a slice of truth from Heaton legends, or a drama reminiscent of the fantastic tales of James Hogg. Down at Rush Isles, for instance, Betty Heaton had married her step-brother John Shackleton (the complexities of inter-marriage fascinated Branwell and Emily), Betty’s father William himself being the youngest son of a thrice-married father. What cousinly attraction or rivalry kept them apart from the Heatons of Ponden Hall? And why did John Murgatroyd Heaton, oldest brother of the unfortunate Elizabeth who had been seduced at seventeen, embezzle five hundred pounds from his father’s estate and die, aged twenty-four?

Down at Sladen Beck, below Bottoms Farm, a child had been found dead in their own time; and if they skirted the Ponden lands, crossed the high road to Colne and trespassed by Two Laws farm, they might catch a sound from poor Bill, who, rebuffed by his sweetheart when he was thirty years old, in 1817, the year Branwell was born, had gone to his room, measuring nine feet by six, and lain there in bed ever since, the window closed, never uttering a word. Folk said he had to roll over to eat his meals, for his legs had become so contracted and drawn to his body that he could no longer move them in the four-poster bed, and when the crumbs fell on the blanket he licked them where they lay.

Nearer home and passing Sowdens, now a farm but a parsonage in days gone by, they would speculate upon the personality of Parson Grimshaw, who had lived there for twenty years, and so scared the Haworth congregation with his sermons about hell-fire that they used to jump out of the public-house windows and run for their lives if they saw him coming. During a service he would leave the church to see if any truant members of the congregation were idling in the churchyard, and if they were he would drive them back into church like a drover herding cattle. No one was permitted to walk in the fields on the Lord’s day: Parson Grimshaw walked out himself to scatter them. Once a man who was guilty of adultery was standing in a shop in Haworth, and Parson Grimshaw, observing him, explained: ‘The devil has been very busy in this neighbourhood. I can touch the man with my stick who lay with another man’s wife last night—the end of these things will be death, the ruin of body and soul for ever.’

Papa at least, brother and sister may have agreed, did not behave like that. Perhaps it had served Parson Grimshaw right when his son Johnny, aged twelve, inherited Ewood over in Midgley from his grandfather, and did as he pleased. It was a curious thing how the sons of parsons so often went to the bad. Gossip said that Johnny Grimshaw drank himself to death two years after his father died. ‘Once tha’ carriest an angel, but now tha’ carriest a devil,’ he cried as he rode his father’s horse into a lather. Emily must have felt sympathy for Johnny’s young sister Jane, sent away to school at Kingswood, near Bristol, and dying there when she was only thirteen, from home-sickness, perhaps, or yearning for the freedom of the moors—who could tell?

Together brother and sister gazed up at the dark windows of Sowdens, where the Grimshaws had lived, wondering, perhaps, whether Johnny and Jane had been by when their evangelical father received ‘the glorious vision from the seventh heaven’. Parson Grimshaw had told John Wesley, ‘Two under my own roof are just now under true conviction, one a girl of about eighteen years, and the other a boy about fourteen; and I hope my own little girl between ten and eleven years old.’

Emily, however, was not always free to roam the moors, or scribble poems and stories in the ‘study’ upstairs; she had to give Tabby a hand in cooking, and practise that wretched hemming under the eyes of Aunt—the latter a penance only made bearable by tales of Cornish Tristan. So Branwell would take himself off, and wander across to the churchyard to talk to John Brown, who, as worshipful Master of the Haworth Three Graces Lodge, was trying to persuade him into Freemasonry.

It was, John assured him, very much of a secret society, with strange rites and solemn initiation ceremonies, and a Brother to guard the door so that no one entered; and if you ever broke your oath and told an outsider what happened within the Lodge—John made an expressive gesture with his hand across his throat.

To Branwell’s father, John Brown would express his enthusiasm for Freemasonry in rather more guarded language. It would give the lad an interest, he must have urged, keep him up to the mark, stop him from fretting his heart out over the disappointment he’d had in London; and so Mr Brontë gave his consent to Branwell’s instruction.

On February 1st, 1836, Branwell was proposed and accepted, and on February 29th—leap year making the day stand out with double significance—he was initiated as a member of the Three Graces Lodge. He was not yet nineteen—the usual age for acceptance being twenty-one—and the ceremony of initiation was an emotional experience for anyone. First, Branwell had to be prepared in an antechamber. Here the Brother acting as steward divested him of all money and metal and bared his left breast, his right arm and his right knee, with the right heel slip-shod. Then he was blindfolded, and a rope put round his neck and a sword pointed to his bare breast. He was led past the Tyler or Outer Guard, of the Lodge door, who announced his approach with three knocks. The Inner Guard gave the alarm, and the Tyler answered that ‘a poor candidate was there in a state of darkness, coming of his own free will and accord and also properly prepared, humbly soliciting to be admitted to the mysteries and privileges of Freemasonry’.

Branwell was permitted to enter, and was made to kneel down before the Worshipful Master—John Brown—while the blessing of Heaven was invoked on the proceedings. He was then conducted round the Lodge for the view of the Brethren, and finally presented by the Senior Warden to the Worshipful Master, who put him through a catechism far more stirring than any he had learnt at his aunt’s knee. He was commanded to kneel and place his right hand on the Bible, while with his left hand he supported the point of a compass to his bare breast. The solemn vows followed, the pledge of secrecy:

I further solemnly promise, that I will not write those secrets, print, carve, engrave or otherwise delineate them… so that our secrets, arts, and hidden mysteries may not become improperly known through my unworthiness.

These several points I solemnly swear to observe, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them, than to have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots, and my body buried in the sand of the sea at low water mark, or a cable’s length from the shore, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours; or the more efficient punishment of being branded as a wilfully perjured individual, void of all moral worth, and unfit to be received in this… or any other warranted lodge…

He was then told to kiss the Bible, and the Worshipful Master asked him what was the predominant wish of his heart. ‘Light,’ the candidate answered; whereupon the Junior Deacon removed the bandage from his eyes.

At last Branwell could see the serious faces of the men he passed in Haworth every day, now solemnly arrayed as Brethren, and John, his friend, so curiously and fearfully changed in his capacity of Worshipful Master—surely the Grand Inquisitor himself stepped out of the Middle Ages.

The various rites were explained to him, and he was taught the secret ‘grip’, or token of an Entered Apprentice. Finally he was presented with the gauge, the gavel and the chisel, and, having first been allowed to dress himself once more, he returned thanks for his initiation and was placed to the west, or opposite the Master.

The long lecture followed, then a catechism on the three clauses, and finally, the ceremony ended, the Lodge was formally closed ‘in perfect harmony’ by the Senior Warden, in ‘the name of the great Architect of the Universe, and by the command of the Worshipful Master’.

Then the Brethren were at liberty ‘to enjoy themselves with innocent mirth, but carefully to avoid excess, and to avoid immoral or obscene discourse’. If the Steward of the Spirit Cupboard made punch on that leap year evening, Branwell no doubt abstained, being a member of the Haworth Temperance Society.

When he came away from that upper room in the house on Newell Hill his mind was alive with images. He could still feel the sword at his naked breast, the cable round his throat and the bandage about his eyes; but if he ever dropped one hint to Charlotte or Emily that appalling fate awaited him.

It made the bond between him and John much closer, though. Now that he had been initiated he felt himself a man, strangely superior to his sisters, and superior too to his father, who would never learn what rites were carried out, what vows were uttered.

From that first evening of initiation Branwell advanced rapidly in the craft, and by April 25th he was raised to the rank of Master Mason, being instructed in the signs of joy and exultation and the five degrees of fellowship. How stimulating it must have been to receive a stroke on the forehead from John, as Worshipful Master, to lie down, shamming dead, and then be raised by John, bringing him foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast. It would have given him a feeling of comradeship shared yet secret. John as Worshipful Master shone with a blaze of power and glory; he was no longer Papa’s sexton but something much bigger, more exciting, a sort of demi-god… or was it demon?

Exciting, too, to exchange private signals with him in the vestry, in front of Papa who did not know what they meant, but continued talking solemnly about church business; or to walk past the post-office and meet the saturnine John Heaton from Well Head, and give him the sign of exultation and have it acknowledged!

These things made up for the disappointment of continuing silence from the editor of Blackwood’s, who had not even had the courtesy to return his long poem ‘Misery’, sent on April 8th, now torn to shreds and lying, no doubt, in some Edinburgh dustbin.

All Dark without, All Fire within,

Can Hell have mightier hold on sin?

Now was the moment, perhaps, to create a bloody revolution in the infernal world, and have Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland, banish his son-in-law, Arthur Zamorna, King of Angria (alias Charlotte imprisoned at Roe Head), two thousand miles away to the rocks of Ascension Isle. The revolution launched, there would be time to paint again—never mind the Royal Academy—fit up as a studio the small back bedroom where he now slept alone, and persuade John to dress up in his Sunday best and have his portrait painted, his leonine head and shoulders backed by an evil storm.