Reverend Patrick Bronte (1777-1861) was an Irish Anglican curate and writer, who spent most of his adult life in England and was the father of the writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, and of Branwell Bronte, his only son. Born Patrick Brunty, he formally changed the spelling of his name from Brunty to Bronte. He had several apprenticeships until he became a teacher in 1798 and moved to Cambridge in 1802 to study theology at St. John's College, gaining his BA degree in 1806. He was appointed curate at Wethersfield, Essex, where he was ordained a deacon of the Church of England, and ordained into the priesthood in 1807. In 1809 he became assistant curate at Wellington in Shropshire and in 1810 he published his first poem Winter Evening Thoughts in a local newspaper, followed in 1811 by a collection of moral verse, Cottage Poems. The following year he was appointed school examiner at a Wesleyan academy, Woodhouse Grove School. He remained active for local causes into his old age, and after the death of his last surviving child, Charlotte, he co-operated with Elizabeth Gaskell on her biography.