Nellie, the maid who had served Hardy for six years, was with him in his bedroom that morning, and he asked her to make him the foods of his childhood, kettle-broth and bacon grilled on the fire as his mother had cooked it.
Mr Hardy’s last meal before he died was kettle-broth, of which he was very fond. He always asked for it when out-of-sorts. Kettle-broth was made from finely chopped parsley, onions and bread cooked in hot water. He had specially asked me for this on the morning of his death-day. He preferred my preparation, as I chopped the ingredients smaller than cook. He also asked for a rasher of bacon to be cooked in front of him in the flame of his bedroom coal-fire. While I cooked the bacon he quietly watched from his bed. He drank the broth, but could not eat the rasher. He only picked at that. 29
Those who saw him thought he seemed stronger, except for his sister Kate, who called and thought ‘he is not going to be here long. He looks like father and altogether I cannot blind myself to what is coming.’ 30 He ate some grapes from a large bunch sent from London and said gaily ‘I’m going on with these.’ Then he dictated to Florence two rough and rude epitaphs on disliked contemporaries. One was George Moore, who had attacked him and was now accused of conceit. The other, ungrammatical but clear in its intentions, went for G. K. Chesterton:
The literary contortionist
Who prove and never turn a hair
That Darwin’s theories were a snare…
And if one with him could not see
He’d shout his choice word ‘Blasphemy’.
It was his final word against Church doctrine and in favour of rational thinking, exemplified by Darwin – a magnificent blast from the sickbed.
As the afternoon darkened to dusk he fell silent, then asked Florence to read a verse from FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám:
Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake;
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give – and take!
Dr Mann came as usual at 7.30 and Hardy talked to him cheerfully about recovering. After he had left, towards nine o’clock, Hardy had a heart attack. Eva was in the room with him as it happened. He spoke some confused words and, when she tried to take his pulse, asked, ‘Eva, what is this?’ It was death, coming to him as she held his hand in hers. His long life, which had begun early on a June morning, ended in the darkness of midwinter, when it is easiest to die.
Epilogue
Hardy’s wish, expressed in his will, was to be buried in the churchyard at Stinsford. There his parents, his grandparents, his sister and Emma lay, in a green and peaceful place he had known from his earliest childhood and which over the years took on a sacred significance for him – sacred to memory, to family, to tradition and to love. Friends who visited it with him saw how he lingered there, reluctant to leave, discussing the gravestones and sometimes pointing to where his own body was to lie.
Sydney Cockerell had other ideas altogether. They came out of his conviction that Thomas Hardy, as a great English writer for whom he was particularly responsible as friend and literary executor, should be buried in Westminster Abbey. He was a man to whom the public realm meant more than private sensitivity, and words like ‘he belongs to the nation’ were brought out to justify his actions. His intentions were good, but what came out of them was a muddle which might have been comic had it not been hideous and false.
Dr Mann was not in the room at the moment of Hardy’s death, and it is not certain that Florence was, but Nellie was in the dressing room and heard his last question to Eva.1 The doctor was summoned back, and, after he had arrived and assured himself that Hardy was dead, Cockerell was told, and went into the kitchen to tell the cook and the maids. This done, he went with Dr Mann in his car into Dorchester and telephoned Barrie and The Times, evidently unwilling to use the Max Gate telephone. He returned to comfort ‘the brave unselfish widow’, sat up with her into the small hours and then attempted to sleep in a chair in the dining room.
Henry and Kate Hardy learnt of their brother’s death only in the morning. They had been telephoned the night before, but they kept early hours and did not answer calls once they had gone to bed. As soon as they heard, from Nellie, who bicycled over, they came to Max Gate and saw their brother’s body, with its ‘triumphant look’.2 By then Cockerell, in spite of his uncomfortable night, had already studied the will, agreed with Barrie that Hardy’s written wishes should be ignored and set in train the arrangements for a funeral at Westminster Abbey. He had gone early to the King’s Arms to resume his telephoning, and also talked to several journalists who turned up there. Then, returning to Max Gate, he had to argue with Henry Hardy, who became very upset when he heard of the Westminster Abbey plan and strongly opposed it. Kate was easier to talk round; and in any case the arrangements were all now under way. Cockerell helped Eva Dugdale wrap Hardy in his scarlet Cambridge Doctor’s gown, observing that his expression was ‘noble, majestic and serene, that of The Happy Warrior’.
A further problem arose when the Abbey indicated that it was not prepared for a ceremony such as had taken place for Dickens or Tennyson, whose bodies were buried under the floor, but that Hardy’s body must be cremated first, so that they need give space only to a small urn containing his ashes. The idea of cremation had never been entertained by Hardy or his family, and this caused further distress.
On Friday telegrams of condolence arrived from King George and the Prince of Wales. The Prime Minister, Baldwin, the editor of The Times and the Dean of Westminster were now all in agreement about an Abbey funeral and Poets’ Corner, and Florence was swept along by Cockerell’s insistence that Hardy belonged to the nation as well as to his family. Worse followed. The vicar of Stinsford called to express his sympathy, and came up with the gruesome suggestion that Hardy’s heart should be cut out and buried where he had asked to be laid. Incredibly, this was accepted by Florence, although she later denied that she had consented to it; but she was distressed and confused.
Cockerell’s diary for Friday, 13 January, is silent on this part of the plan, but contains the surprising information that journalists were allowed in to view Hardy’s body – something Florence later told T. E. Lawrence was ‘without my knowledge or consent’.3 It reads:
Another very busy morning seeing the undertaker, seeing journalists, five of them came to see the body, and telephoning to London about arrangements. Mrs Hardy full of doubt as to the decision to bury in the Abbey, instead of at Stinsford, but confesses that her doubts would have been equally great if the decision had been the other way about.
Cockerell was on the midday train to London and went straight to Macmillan’s to make further arrangements for the service at the Abbey. After this he went to the crematorium to choose an urn for Hardy’s ashes and decide on the inscription.
On the evening of the 13th Dr Mann came with the local surgeon, Nash-Wortham, and Mary Eastment, the young operating theatre Sister from Dorchester hospital, reluctantly giving up her off-duty time and unimpressed by the occasion. Hardy’s heart was extracted from his chest and wrapped in a small towel. They had no container, so a biscuit tin was brought up from the kitchen. It was taken away by Mann to his house – why, nobody knows – and brought back to Max Gate, still in the biscuit tin, the following day, to be moved into a ‘burial casket’. A persistent story that the doctor’s cat had knocked the tin off the mantelpiece and attacked the heart was denied by Dr Mann; it may have originated in the pubs of Dorchester, where macabre jokes were no doubt appreciated. In any case the tin was back at Max Gate the next day and its contents transferred into the burial casket.4 Gosse, when he heard what had been done, called it ‘medieval butchery’, but tactfully made no public comment.5
Cockerell went to Barrie’s London flat that night, intending to return to Dorchester, where he had left his black suit, and to travel with Hardy’s body to Woking Crematorium. It seems that no one else was expected to accompany the body
there. On Saturday morning, however, Cockerell had a telegram from his invalid wife summoning him home to Cambridge, where he found her suffering from severe and exhausting pain. He remained in Cambridge and organized two nurses to come from London to look after her, while Barrie went to Dorchester in his place, with instructions to bring back Cockerell’s black clothes with him. Early the next morning Barrie went with the first hearse to Woking, attended the cremation and travelled on to London with Hardy’s ashes in the urn chosen by Cockerell, delivering it to those in charge at the Abbey. He kept with him a small wreath of lilies entrusted to him by Florence when he left Max Gate, which he carried into the Abbey two days later.
All this time there were journalists hanging about Dorchester. One managed to interview Hardy’s 84-year-old cousin Theresa at Bockhampton and report her disapproval not only of the Abbey burial, away from his own people, but of his having taken up writing in the first place. On Monday, the day of the two funerals, there were dozens of press men and photographers gathered outside Max Gate early in the morning, and when the second hearse came for the heart they followed it up to the house. Bertie the gardener told them to leave the grounds, and they retreated, but when the undertaker came out to lay narcissi in the hearse, followed by the bearers with the casket, and by Florence, the photographers advanced again and she felt she had to hide in the porch.6 Once the hearse had gone, she set off with Kate Hardy and Dr Mann for the London train. At Waterloo, Cockerell met them and drove with them to Dean’s Yard, where they were given sandwiches and coffee before going into the Abbey. The service began at two.
Henry had stayed in Dorset to attend the burial of his brother’s heart at Stinsford, also attended by Gertrude Bugler. There were crowds of curious local people and some friendly neighbours, and the sun shone, while in London rain poured down on the crowds outside the Abbey.
Inside, the floor of Poets’ Corner was covered with a white-edged purple carpet with a small oblong hole in the centre, also edged in white, where the urn was to go. Ten pallbearers were assembled, the Prime Minister, Baldwin, and the leader of the opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, the heads of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Queen’s College, Oxford, and six writers: Housman, Kipling, Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy and Gosse. To make sense of such a procession, the urn had been placed inside a coffin-like container covered with a white satin cloth and laid on a bier, beside which the ‘elderly gentlemen, rather red and stiff’ processed.7 Kipling and Shaw had never met and were introduced to one another by Gosse in the Abbey: it was probably their only meeting. Charlotte Shaw described the occasion in a letter to T. E. Lawrence in India:
I went 35 minutes early and found nearly all the places filled up, but got a seat almost in the middle of the south transept. The burial was at the south end of the south transept… It seemed absurd to have an immense bier and a great and splendid pall, white, embroidered with royal crowns and many other emblems, to enclose one small casket, but it made its effect.
The service was very beautifully sung, and I have never heard anything better read than the lesson ‘Let us now praise famous men’. When the procession came down the south transept they all passed quite near me. I was curiously impressed by Baldwin. I had never seen him before; he is far stronger than I thought. He was the only one who looked entirely unimpressed. I almost fancied he looked amused. I was terribly afraid GBS would act: but no. He did it perfectly. Kipling I thought sinister.
The clergy came first and shocked me. All except one looked full of worldly pomp and disdain; self-conscious jacks-in-the-box– but that one, young, appeared wrapped from the world. Then came the catafalque, and after some men friends and finally Mrs Hardy with Mr Cockerell. The first time they passed she looked sweet and calm, but was so completely swathed in crape that her face was invisible; as she passed [again?] she was hanging on Mr Cockerell’s arm, and seemed completely broken. The service at the grave must have been terribly trying for her. All the rest of the time, they tell me, she was hidden in some recess; but there, of course, she had to stand out prominently. Mr Cockerell was splendid: a rock of strength and most dignified. He gives the impression (sometimes) of restrained emotion, but I don’t think he feels anything very deeply really…
Then a wonderful thing came. On that glorious organ an almost divine organist played the Dead March from ‘Saul’. I say advisedly that was among the most splendid things of my life. He began very low and soft and gradually opened out, making one’s whole being thrill to each great phrase up to a most marvellous burst of great chords – confident, assertive, triumphant. Ah! it takes Handel to say the last word.8
Her husband, GBS, was less impressed. He remembered chiefly that, ‘As we marched, pretending to carry the ashes of whatever part of Hardy was buried in the Abbey, Kipling, who fidgeted continually and was next in front of me, kept changing his step. Every time he did so I nearly fell over him.’9
So Hardy was treated to two religious burials, neither of them what he had wanted. Florence and Kate were given what Kate described as ‘another crumb and a taste of tea’ at Barrie’s flat and put smartly on the 4.30 train back to Dorchester. It had been an exhausting day for them and one in which they had been denied any part in the arrangements. Mrs Woolf spent the evening with Bloomsbury friends, listening to Lytton Strachey blacken Hardy’s reputation, his novels ‘the poorest of poor stuff’, etc.10 On the day of the funeral the Dean of Westminster wrote to the vicar of Fordington, the Revd R. G. Bartelot, Emma’s old friend and ally, to inquire about Hardy’s spiritual status:
My permission to bury T. Hardy in Wr Abbey has given rise to a great deal of controversy. I am receiving every day furious protests on the ground that his teaching was antichristian: that he himself was not a Christian (!): that his moral standard was low etc. etc. etc. I should take no notice of wild talk of this kind: but today I have received a letter from the head of a great religious body – which I must answer. I knew little of T.H. beyond his writings, but a mutual friend of his and mine has a very high opinion of his essential Christianity and went so far as to describe him to me as a ‘determined Churchman’.
Can you tell me what the truth really is – as to his own faith and practice and as to his moral standards.
I have no qualms about allowing his burial in Wr Abbey myself but I want material with which to confute his assailants.11
Bartelot wrote back at once testifying to Hardy’s having been ‘at heart a Christian and a Churchman’, although he had not actually attended his church once in twenty-one years. His grounds for saying so were that he gave donations to church funds, had been observed joining in the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed on occasion, had never formally recanted the Christianity conferred by christening and had lived a life of absolute moral rectitude. The testimonial would have made Hardy smile.
William Rothenstein, who had made a sketch of the pallbearers standing together in the Abbey, showed it to Gosse and to Florence, who were keen for him to make a proper record of the scene. The Prime Minister was easily persuaded to sit, but Housman and Barrie both made difficulties and after much negotiation Rothenstein gave up the project as too troublesome and tiresome, to Gosse’s indignation and Florence’s disappointment.12 Henry Hardy, who hoped to build a memorial tower of his own design for his brother, did not achieve it and died at the end of the year.
Hardy’s will caused a stir when it was published because no one had expected him to have an estate of nearly £100,000. He made small bequests to animal charities but nothing to any Dorchester ones. Like many people who live longer than they expect to, he had failed to bring his will up to date, so that his brother and sister, both old and childless, were left with much more money than they needed. To Florence went all his royalties, an annuity of £600 a year and Max Gate with everything in it; a clause, standard in rich men’s wills and supposed to deter fortune hunters who prey on widows, halved her annuity should she marry again. Five months after the funeral, on 14 June, she told Cockerell that she and Barrie were to
be married the following year. Cockerell put an exclamation mark after the entry in his diary and wrote ‘A secret’.13 In the autumn she took a flat close to Barrie’s at Adelphi Terrace, and they saw a great deal of one another. Presently he managed to withdraw from his proposal, and Florence, humiliated, returned to Max Gate; although the friendship survived, it was not the same. With Cockerell the situation quickly became disastrous. He and Florence, joint literary executors, disagreed about memorials and publications; she thought him overbearing, and he found her devious. Within two years of Hardy’s death they had quarrelled so badly that they were barely able to communicate, even by letter.
They had at least managed to bring out Hardy’s last collection of poetry, Winter Words, which appeared in October and went into a second impression. She also published both volumes of the biographical work she and Hardy had prepared, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy in November 1928 and The Later Years in 1930, under her own name as agreed with him. They were respectfully received but did not arouse much interest or sell well.14
In 1930 a novel by Somerset Maugham appeared, Cakes and Ale, cruelly entertaining about the literary world and construed by many to be a portrait of Hardy and a mockery of his second wife. It became a bestseller, and, although the central figure is nothing like Hardy, it caused Florence intense distress, especially as she suspected supposed friends such as Sassoon of supplying Maugham with information about her. Bruised and sad, she devoted herself to good works in Dorchester and remained at Max Gate, the house she had always hated. A dull statue of Hardy was put up in Dorchester in 1931. The deaths of T. E. Lawrence in an accident in 1935 and of Barrie two years later were further blows to Florence. By then she was ill with cancer of the bowel, and she too died, a few months after Barrie, aged only fifty-eight. She had survived her old husband by less than ten years, a woman of many sorrows who had devoted herself to him and served him well but found no joy in her life.
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