Something of what Annie Boyd feels about this paternal betrayal will be revealed after her mother’s death, when she picks a Catholic to marry. Boyd is virulently and publicly anti-Catholic, and author of the fundamentalist Protestant The Fathers not Papists. In these circles, though, his prejudice is one of the more normal aspects of his behaviour. The Barretts are anti-Catholic too. If anything, they’ve shifted from the Established Church in the ‘opposite’ direction, towards Nonconformism. On Sunday mornings they attend the Anglican parish church, and on Sunday evenings the Nonconformist chapel at the park ‘Gate’, ‘Driving to church—driving back again—driving to chapel—driving back again—& prayers three times at home besides!’ as Elizabeth records.
They’re very much in step with their times. Since its split from the Anglican Church at the end of the eighteenth century, Methodism has been developing rapidly not only in Britain but in North America and in British colonies including Jamaica, where it has become associated with the abolitionist movement. Nonconformism will continue to grow at a tremendous rate throughout Elizabeth’s lifetime. Membership of the Church of England remains an essential social passport – it’s a condition for matriculation at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, for example – but Methodism’s attractions for someone like Elizabeth include the movement’s very active engagement with ‘the Word’ through Bible study, inspiring sermons – to ‘make me glow’ as Elizabeth puts it – and its flourishing hymn-writing. Papa regularly rides ten miles or more through the orchard country of north-west Gloucestershire to Bible meetings in Newent or Redmarley D’Abitot. His eldest daughter reads ‘every day, seven chapters of Scripture’, although sometimes she finds ‘my heart & mind are not affected by this exercise as they should be’. All the same, years from now Nonconformism will be one of the things that she and her future husband have in common.
Despite this deepening religious radicalism, convention shapes Barrett family life. After all, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett was elected High Sheriff of Herefordshire in 1814. So now Aunt Bummy asks Elizabeth not to discuss the family’s gathering financial troubles with Mr Boyd. For behind the scenes Papa has been dealing with financial (and consequently social) near catastrophe. As Elizabeth will discover, only money’s intrinsically conservative tendency to stick with the status quo has so far saved him from having humiliatingly to uproot the family from Hope End.
And this threat of a move isn’t the only trauma playing itself out beyond the narrow focus of her attention. One of the main reasons her life at twenty-six is over-determined by two middle-aged men – her father, and Boyd, the man who has masqueraded as a mentor for the last five years – is that she lacks a mother’s advice, attention and love. In particular, Mamma might have helped correct the latter’s destructive embroilment with her eldest child. But she has been gone for four years. The Elizabeth that Boyd has been toying with has been prey to chaotic wishful thinking and the acting out of an enormous grief.
When Mary Moulton-Barrett died in autumn 1828, she had been unwell for months. But her death still came as a profound shock to the family. She’d never fully recovered from the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, and when her own mother died in November 1827 she was overwhelmed by grief. In the following months, everyone put her worsening symptoms down to mourning. Finally, in May 1828, Dr Carden was sent for. He diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, but was encouraging; later, he supported a decision to send the patient to Cheltenham. So on 30 September Mamma set out with Bummy and Henrietta for the spa town. Next day she was well enough to send home a reassuring note because ‘my beloved Ba’s tearful eyes as I parted with her yesterday have hung somewhat heavily on my heart’. The trio were staying ‘not in the Square, therefore not quite so gay as our fancy pictured’, she reported, but in charming and comfortable premises at 14 Montpellier Terrace.
Her death a week later, on 7 October, was so unexpected that even her husband wasn’t at her bedside. He received the news in London the next morning – and was overwhelmed. The jumbled letter of prayer and incoherent grief he dashed off to Elizabeth in the moments before setting out for Cheltenham reveals a raw and genuine loss. For Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, Mary’s death foreclosed what had after all been a genuine love match, and marked the end of any sense that things always turn out right.
As for Elizabeth: so long reliant on words, she now found them useless. She couldn’t cry either. ‘I dare say God will touch my heart & make me cry soon, & then I shall be even better than I am now—better
