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The european Journal of life WriTing
VoluMe iX (2020) lW&D132–lW&D150
European Journal of Life Writing, Vol IX, 132–150 2020.
https://doi.org.10.21827/ejlw.9.36903
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy
and His Funerals
Charles Lock
University of Copenhagen
[J.M. Barrie] was especially tickled by Hardy’s preoccupation with plans for
his own burial—plans, continuously changed. ‘One day Hardy took me . . .
to see the place where he’s to be buried, and the next day he took me to see
the place where he would like next best to be buried. Usually he says he is to
be buried between his wives; but sometimes, so many inches nearer the first;
sometimes, so many inches nearer to the second.’
Cynthia Asquith, Portrait of Barrie
(London: James Barrie, 1954), p. 107
The wrongness of two funerals and the wretchedness of Florence’s later
years bring a sombre end to any account of Hardy.
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man
(London: Penguin, 2006), p. 377
ABSTRACT
This essay considers Hardy’s two funerals—for his ashes at Poets’ Corner, for
his heart at Stinsford—in the light of their consequences for life-writing: the
absence of a single resting-place, and the narrative demands of synchronicity
in telling of two funerals. This division of the body was the consequence of an
extraordinar y lack of precision in Hardy’s own will, the composition, wording
and interpretation of which are examined here in some detail. Attention is also
paid to the single grave at Stinsford that holds the remains of Hardy and both
his wives in diverse modalities of the invisible.
Keywords: Thomas Hardy, wills and testaments, ashes, funerals, heart-burials
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 133
Mark Ford’s Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (2016) takes Hardy’s own iden-
tifying term as its argument, thereby endorsing Hardy’s protest against
the misleading way in which he had been both critically and socially
confined to ‘Wessex’. Hardy’s beginning is single and unambiguous: he
was born in the cottage at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, now known as
‘Hardy’s Birthplace’. Yet his ends are complex: his corpse was divided and
for each part both a funeral and a burial was held. Taking Hardy’s ends
for his own beginning, Ford in his opening chapter, ‘In Death Divided’,
narrates how those body-parts came to symbolise the topographical divi-
sions of Hardy’s biography, now perpetuated in two graves: one (the
corpse—without heart—cremated) in Westminster Abbey, the other (the
heart) in Stinsford Churchyard.
‘In Death Divided’ echoes against the Biblical phrase, ‘In death they
were not divided’.1 Whereas two lovers may, regrettably, be sundered in
death, a single grave holding a loving couple invites epitaphic celebration
of a well-matched pair, eternally united. ‘In death they were not divided’
affirms a union beyond or despite that parting by death that the marriage
service anticipates, and that the law acknowledges as terminal. Rather dif-
ferent from either of these is the fate of Thomas Hardy, of whom it might
be said: till death did him part. Subjected to post-mortem surgery, one
corpse would furnish the matter for two funeral services, held simultane-
ously a hundred miles apart, his remains now resting in two burial plots
no less sundered. Where, then, might Thomas Hardy’s life be said prop-
erly to have ended? And at which of the burial-sites, if at either, might the
devoted reader sense the author’s aura or ‘presence’? Where does one feel
that due homage has been paid?
Hardy had imagined in verse many instances of trouble in mortality,
whether in ‘The Levelled Churchyard’ where ‘each to each exclaims in
fear/“I know not which I am!”’ or ‘In Death Divided’, where the poet
imagines a time when he and his beloved will be buried far from each
other, neither monument acknowledging the other:
The simply- cut memorial at my head
Perhaps may take
A rustic form, and that above your bed
A stately make;
No linking symbol show thereon for our tale’s sake.
And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run
Humanity,
The eternal tie which binds us twain in one
No eye will see
Stretching across the miles that sever you from me.2
134 Charles Lock
An illicit, covert love, implicitly between persons of divergent classes—
he rustic, she stately3—will have no memorial; this tends to be the post-
mortem state of affairs, or most of them. Hardy himself, much more
unusually, even among the twice-wed, is buried with both his wives. Yet,
not all of him being in that grave, we might hear him phrase the thread
that links Stinsford and Westminster as ‘stretching across the miles that
sever me from me’.
Thomas Hardy’s last will, dated 24 August 1922, was drawn up in full
awareness of what was at stake and what problems had to be forestalled.
Of paramount concern was not property, whether messuages or chattels,
but the disposal of a body, which is in law neither land nor possession: the
body of the deceased, or of the not-yet-deceased; the body of the one who
by his signature attests to the will to be put into effect after his decease:
THIS IS THE L AST WILL AND TESTAMENT of me, THOMAS HA RDY, of
Max Gate, Dorchester, in the County of Dorset, Esquire, O.M.
And this is the very first item:
1. It is my wish that I may be buried in Stinsford Churchyard Dorset near
to the Grave of my parents and if possible in my wife Emma’s Grave or
close at the foot thereof according to consideration detailed in my direc-
tions to my Executors on a separate paper.4
The phrase following ‘thereof’ created trouble, as we shall see. In his
widow’s will, drawn up and signed on 18 May 1937, within five months of
her death on 17 October, ‘Florence Emily Hardy of “Max Gate”, Dorches-
ter, in the County of Dorset, widow of the late Thomas Hardy, O.M.,
deceased’ is concerned first with specifying the responsibilities of the
trustees before willing the disposal of her body, as item 3:
3. I wish to be cremated and that my ashes be placed in the grave at Stins-
ford Churchyard in which my husband’s heart is buried and I desire
that the inscription which my husband composed with my name and the
necessar y particulars be placed on the south side of the tomb.5
Despite the addition of four codicils in as many months, this Will led to
no controversy: Florence was buried as she (and her husband) had willed,
and indeed the heart of Thomas Hardy lies in Stinsford Churchyard now,
between his two wives: Emma who had died in 1912 and Florence whom
he had married in 1914. And yet symmetry is lacking, not to those inno-
cently admiring this rural scene, but to those who know what was willed
of the remains: in one grave lies Emma’s body, in the other, Florence’s
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 135
ashes. This imbalance in matter is but one of the consequences—and
that seldom regarded—of a will shockingly and (we suppose) deliberately
misconstrued.
It is the responsibility of the one who draws up a will, or any document
intended to carry legal force, that linguistic ambiguities be reduced to a
minimum and that the wording should uphold and assert the authority
of the performative. The formulaic conventions of a will retain in writing,
unconcealed, the markers of oral testimony: ‘Signed by Thomas Hardy as
his will in our presence and by us in his presence.’ The problem in Hardy’s
will lies in the word ‘according’, which here governs a clause that takes
us to a place not ‘herein’ nor ‘heretofore’ nor to ‘the above’ nor to ‘the
said’. These are all forms of ‘intradiscursive deixis’, pointing the reader
to words, phrases and clauses contained within the present document; in
coming upon the phrase ‘as above’ the reader will keep her eyes on the
text, not raise them to the skies. A will, in providing commentary, clarifi-
cation and interpretation of terms already introduced, should point only
to its own specifics. A codicil differs from a will in that its sense depends
on reference to specific points of an already existing document: the will.
A will needs to be semantically autonomous, self-contained; a codicil,
being supplementary, never is. Of course, the phrase ‘according to’ need
not always in legal usage be ‘intradiscursive’; it is frequently found in one
legal text to refer to another, and within that to a numbered paragraph
or article or section. What is fundamental to its legal status, whether for
interpretation or for due process, is that the text elsewhere, referred to
and identified by such a phrase as ‘according to’ or ‘pursuant upon’, must
be available in the public sphere. A will must be made public in probate,
that is, before it can be executed. One cannot (in an open society) have
a legal document stipulating that any of its clauses should be ‘in accor-
dance’ with a text elsewhere that is unpublished and unavailable—one,
let us suppose, to which only the judge has access. Despotism thrives on
such.
The value of Hardy’s Will is depreciated in and by its very wording:
‘according to consideration detailed in my directions to my Executors on
a separate paper.’ A writer, a lawyer, a teacher: each of us knows that this
sentence ought to have stopped ‘at the foot thereof’. The implication of
the added clause—‘or close at the foot thereof according to consideration
detailed in my directions to my Executors on a separate paper’—may well
be that such a consideration should be limited to the question of where,
in relation to Emma’s grave, Hardy’s body should lie: somewhere within
Stinsford Churchyard. But implication carries little weight in the law. The
extraordinary aspect of this will is that, ‘according to a consideration’
that forms no part of the Will, and whose very existence is not affirmed
136 Charles Lock
(nor its location indicated), the first paragraph of the Will is vulnerable
to being modified, countermanded or ignored, and is liable to be ren-
dered invalid by whatever might yet be willed ‘on a separate paper’. The
authority that a will carries through the sheer presence of its rhetoric has
been, by this alternative ‘according’, utterly compromised. It is unusual
that the disposal of the body should be so important as to be given prece-
dence in a will over all other considerations. It is astonishing that, given
such prominence, the instructions regarding burial should be so worded
as to render its legal weight almost nugatory.
According to §19 of Thomas Hardy’s Will, Lloyds Bank was named as
sole TRUSTEES and EXECUTORS of the Will, while Sydney Cockerell
and Florence Emily Hardy were to be appointed as his ‘Literary EXEC-
UTORS’. Declining a university education, Cockerell (1867–1962) had
elected instead to become a disciple of John Ruskin, subsequently find-
ing employment as secretary to William Morris. In 1908, Cockerell was
appointed Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and there he remained
until 1937. Though he and Hardy were friends, they were of very different
temperaments. When in 1924 the Balliol Players gave a private perfor-
mance of the Oresteia at Max Gate, Cockerell and Hardy formed almost
the entire audience, and the contrast was recalled by the production’s
actor-manager, Walter Oakeshott: ‘Hardy, small, bright-eyed, quiet, and
utterly unassuming; S.C. equally small, but possessive and masterful.’6
Hardy chose Cockerell from among those he knew of a younger genera-
tion, as one extremely well-connected and influential, with the power and
competence to get things done. Throughout, Cockerell assumed in effect
the role of Executor, for Lloyds Bank played no part in the events imme-
diately following Hardy’s death.
Approaching the end, Hardy had remained in bed for four weeks
and had barely stirred since 11 December 1927; on 9 January 1928 he
seemed to be fading further and Florence summoned Sidney Cocker-
ell by telegram. He arrived at Max Gate that evening, though he was
not invited into Hardy’s bedroom. Florence had also summoned J. M.
Barrie who, a trusted friend of Hardy’s since 1907, had grown close to
her.7 Neither man was admitted to Hardy’s presence, as Florence had
already intimated in a message to Cockerell: ‘If you think it well to be
in Dorchester come—only T. must not see you, or even know you are
there.’ 8 Barrie spent the night in a Dorchester hotel while (somewhat
surprisingly) Cockerell slept in his clothes in the dining-room of Max
Gate. These two distinguished men, summoned urgently from London
yet finding themselves superfluous, would presumably have passed that
evening together, either at Max Gate or at Barrie’s hotel in Dorchester.9
And on their own, to continue the conjecture, they conspired to set in
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 137
motion events far from accordant with Hardy’s Will—even though the
Will had not yet been opened.
Strangely, given that Hardy’s death was evidently near, Barrie chose
not to stay to the end but instead returned to London the very next day,
on Tuesday 10 January.10 There he solicited the support of the Prime Min-
ister and the Editor of the Times in petitioning the Dean of Westmin-
ster Abbey, William Foxley Norris, to hold the funeral in the Abbey, and
to have Hardy’s remains interred in Poets’ Corner. (Hardy was not yet
deceased.)
Cockerell was kept away from Hardy’s bedroom the next day also—
Wednesday 11 January—though he remained at Max Gate. Hardy died
that evening at 9.05 p.m.11 As soon as Hardy’s doctor, Dr. E. W. Mann, had
signed the death certificate Cockerell made a telephone call to London
and Hardy’s death was announced that same evening by the BBC at the
end of the nine o’clock news.12
That evening, before sleeping again at Max Gate, Cockerell opened
the Will, without authorization from the Executors (Lloyds Bank) and in
the absence of Florence. He laid the Will out on the dining-room table
for Florence to see in the morning although he did not display (then,
or ever) the ‘separate paper’ that he claimed, the next morning, to have
found in the envelope. The ‘instructions’ thereon were to cause great
shock and distress, immediately to the surviving members of Hardy’s fam-
ily, his brother Henry and his sister Kate, and later, in retrospect, to Flor-
ence herself.13 The entries in Kate’s diary for 12th and 13th January 1928
are moving in their anger and helplessness. Kate and Henry visited Max
Gate:
12 [January] We found Eva [Dugdale, Florence’s sister], Mr Cockerell,
Dr. Mann there with Florence. It seems they want to bury Tom at Westmin-
ster Abbey—it seems the wish of Mr Cockerell, Sir James Barrie & Florence.
H. & I prefer Stinsford of course as we understand he wished to lie there
but they say that among his papers is a notice to the effect that ‘if the nation
desire it otherwise’ he can be buried at Westminster A. It is a great grief to
us two—but naturally we were ruled right out of it. […]14
That ‘notice’ among his papers may have been the ‘separate paper’ detail-
ing ‘directions to my executors’. However, neither the ‘notice’ nor the
‘separate paper’ has ever been found, ‘among his papers’ or anywhere
else: whether one or two, it or they are presumed to be a fiction con-
cocted by Cockerell. It is generally accepted that Cockerell opened the
Will on his own. Did he find the separate paper in the envelope contain-
ing the will, and thereon read instructions concerning a site not too far
138 Charles Lock
from Emma’s grave? Or did he find a plan of Stinsford Churchyard that
indicated an alternative place for burial? Or did Cockerell find nothing
but the Will? If the separate paper was concerned only with Stinsford
Churchyard, Cockerell would have thought it wise to destroy it; if, how-
ever, on this paper, Hardy had indicated some aspiration (or consent) to
be buried in the Abbey, Cockerell would surely have displayed it. Given
his considerable authority, he could have invented the instructions, trust-
ing that nobody would have the impudence to challenge him to produce
the evidence. ‘The apparent non-survival’ of that paper, in Millgate’s
words, ‘poses serious problems’.15
Kate’s Diary for the following day, Friday 13 January:
13 [Henry] & I went to [Dorchester] for one or two things & called at Max
Gate on our way back. We saw only Florence who told us incidentally that
Tom is to be cremated. This was another staggering blow but we kept ‘a stiff
upper lip’. […] Between 8 & 9 this evening Mr & Mrs Cowley [the Vicar of
Stinsford and his wife] called to say Tom’s heart is to be buried at Stinsford.
Another staggering blow but still we go on quietly. What a world-wide talk
such doings are causing.
It was the Revd. H. G. B. Cowley who devised the compromise whereby
the corpse could be divided and the claims of both nation and parish
thus be met: Cowley was, after all, about to be denied the opportunity of
conducting a most illustrious funeral at Stinsford. The ‘heart-burial’ pla-
cated Kate and Henry somewhat; it meant that one part of the body would
not only be buried at Stinsford but would also be spared cremation.16 This
solution salvaged to some degree the dignity of Stinsford Church and
assuaged the hurt felt by Hardy’s closest relatives.17 Dr. Mann was appar-
ently present during these discussions for he gave his medical assent and
called in his senior partner, Dr. Nash-Wortham, who had surgical train-
ing, to perform the operation. Between the time of the dividing opera-
tion and the day of the two funerals Dr. Mann is said to have been the
custodian of Hardy’s heart. He kept it in a biscuit-tin. In the midst of mis-
placed ambitions and vulgar social scrambling, here is a simple domestic
detail—though one that led to further gossip (quite unattested) that the
cat had got hold of the heart.18
Almost everything about this episode is shocking and offensive, but
what most appals is that a poet should be ignominiously subjected to so
crass a misreading of metaphor. When a poet (or anyone outside a physio-
logical context) speaks of the heart, or to the heart, she is not usually refer-
ring to the cardiac organ. In an age more sensitive to rhetoric, the age of
Shakespeare, for example, these doings would be unthinkable: imagine
140 Charles Lock
the royal physician being summoned to investigate surgically whether
Queen Mary really did have ‘Calais’ engraved on her heart. Cockerell’s
interfering presumptuousness led to much unhappiness. Even the doc-
tors would have needed to keep a stiff upper lip as they went through with
the charade, under his orders. Dr. Mann’s sensitivity and dry wit endeared
him to Hardy’s sister Kate. And the elegantly ambiguous inscription on
the grave at Stinsford—‘Here lies the heart of Thomas Hardy O.M.’—may
still touch ours, the more poignantly if we suppress any thought of a car-
diac organ kept overnight in a biscuit tin.
Once the surgery had been performed, the heartless corpse was taken
in a hearse to Woking Crematorium.19 This was the earliest to be con-
structed in Britain and was first officially used for a cremation in 1885.
Cremation had become legal only in 1884, and Kate’s response to the
news that her brother was to be cremated—‘another staggering blow’—is
not a symptom of provincial thinking; cremation remained controversial
for decades, though as early as 1910 it was stipulated that for a burial
in Westminster Abbey only ashes would be accepted.20 Thus one church
building—of the highest symbolic importance in the national life—had
enforced very early a practice about which the Church of England as an
institution would long remain ambivalent.21 From the Woking Cremato-
rium, Barrie carried the casket to London by train.
There were to be two funerals held simultaneously, at St. Michael’s
Stinsford and at the Abbey, on Monday 16 January 1911, at 2 pm.22
Cockerell decreed that Hardy’s two siblings would be apportioned, one
to each, though it was not Cockerell who informed them of this decision,
as Kate recorded: ‘Dr. Mann came this morning. It seems that I am to go
to Westminster Abbey to the funeral tomorrow & H. to Stinsford. […] I
was frightfully busy all day & up till midnight.’23
Dr. Mann accompanied Florence and Kate by train from Dorchester to
Waterloo, and then to the Abbey, where they were seated, as chief mourn-
ers, with Cockerell. The coffin was carried by as distinguished a set of
pallbearers as could be mustered in England: Stanley Baldwin, the Prime
Minister, and Ramsay Macdonald, former Prime Minister and Leader of
the Opposition, and six writers: Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw,
J. M. Barrie, A. E. Housman, Edmund Gosse and John Galsworthy—each
one to this day a name in literar y history. With them, the two heads of the
colleges at Oxford and Cambridge of which Hardy had been made an
Honorar y Fellow.24 Ten such imposing men to carry one casket? Virginia
Woolf was in the congregation and recorded the funeral in her diary for
the following day, Tuesday 17 January: ‘[…] next here is the coffin, an
overgrown one; like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth: bearers
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 141
elderly gentlemen rather red & stiff.’25 Well described as ‘a stage coffin’,
what seemed to be borne on the shoulders of ten men contained only
ashes.
Kate was unimpressed by the occasion: ‘It was all very mournful &
hopeless & strange & I was relieved when it was over. Then to Sir James
Barrie’s for another crumb & a taste of tea, then Waterloo for home.
Dr. Mann came right home with me.’26 She was not alone in finding the
funeral hard to endure; T. E. Lawrence (who was not in attendance) wrote
to a friend of his distaste at how ‘these sleek Deans and Canons were act-
ing a lie behind his name’ while the anthropologist and folklorist Edward
Clodd—no upholder of traditional values or practices—regarded the
dividing of Hardy’s body as ‘very repellent’.27
Florence herself came to regret bitterly that she had acceded to
Cockerell’s plans, even calling them ‘wicked’, and telling the Ameri-
can scholar Richard Little Purdy a year later in conversation: ‘One is
not responsible at such a time. I never gave my consent, it never should
have been done—it was contrary to Mr. Hardy’s wish.’28 On the one side,
Florence was under pressure from two distinguished men who repre-
sented London and the ‘nation’s interests’; on the other, she would face
in Dorchester a degree of suspicion and recrimination that would last
for the remainder of her life.
On 18 January 1928, two days after the funeral, the humorous weekly
Punch carried a brief composition by its Editor, Owen Seaman:
The Nation’s Temple claims her noblest Dead,
So to its care his ashes we confide,
But where his heart would choose a lowlier bed
There lay it, in his own loved countr yside.29
Seaman makes a neat play on the heart choosing where it would like to be
laid, though in no respect criticising the absurdity of the division. Indeed,
in a letter prompted by an appreciative message from Florence, Seaman
explained that the ancient practice of a separate heart-burial was to be
explained by the desire to preserve the heart from the flames.30
Recently I have come across two poems on the theme of that divi-
sion, apparently submitted for publication in the latter half of January
1928, though neither was accepted. One is by a poet celebrated then as
now, Siegfried Sassoon, the other by one quite unknown to fame. What
both poems share is a sense of indignation, even outrage, at what had
happened to the man they knew. Sassoon had first visited Max Gate
in November 1918, a meeting commemorated in some fine and lasting
lines:
142 Charles Lock
He wore an air of never hav ing heard
That there was much that needed putting right.
Hardy, the Wessex wizard, wasn’t there.
On Hardy’s death Sassoon composed a poem that was discovered only
in 1975, among papers acquired by the Eton College Library. The poem
was first printed in the Eton College Chronicle in 1980 and has been little
noticed since. ‘Catafalque’ seems still to be in the drafting, but there is
some biting force in the obviousness of the rhymes:
CATA FALQUE
Thomas Hardy is dead.
Panegyrics have been piled upon his head.
‘The Last Great Victorian’ —
Fleet Street re-echoed, unctuous and stentorian.
‘In the Abbey let him rest’.
(His wishes were well known, but we know best).
This has been done
To the satisfaction of almost everyone.
‘Thomas Hardy’ meant
The antithesis of self-advertisement.
Now his renown is pooled.
Publishers are scrambling to be first in the field with books about him before
the canonized combustion has cooled.
Thomas Hardy has died.
Upon his name the world has heaped its pride.
And those who love him
Stand silent with their genuine grief above him
Who stands no more upright
But has bequeathed them wisdom and compassionate sight.31
The last three couplets are clearly unfinished but the first five aspire to
epigrammatic wit, while the sixth enforces in the voice the breathlessness
it mocks. Sassoon’s anger was widely shared, though seldom with such
rhythmical craft; that anger, and any disapproval of how London and the
Establishment had treated Hardy in death, was comprehensively kept out
of the public eye by magazine editors.
The Wood Homer family of Puddletown had lived in Bardolf Manor
since it was built in the 1890s, and before that in Athelhampton Hall.
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 143
They were among the landed neighbours with whom in later life Hardy
was on good terms. Christine Wood Homer (1883–1975), the daugh-
ter of Hardy’s friends George and Elizabeth, was active in local history
and archaeological circles, and the author in her old age of a pamphlet,
Thomas Hardy and his two Wives (1964); her memories of Hardy reached
back to the 1890s. In the Eton College Library is an unpublished poem in
manuscript attributed to her: ‘On Hearing that Thomas Hardy was to be
buried at Westminster.’ This poem seems to have been penned between
the evening of Wednesday 11 January and the funeral on Monday the
16th. Which of these two versions, voiced in first or third-person (the
third is given here), was sent to newspapers we do not know. It was never
printed.
On Hearing that Thomas Hardy was to be buried at Westminster
Oh ye who knew how much he loved his land
How much he loved the spot where he was born
How oft he watched the twi’light turn to night
And saw the Darkness brighten to the morn
O’er that same Heath of which he wrote so oft
And where his truest dreams of life were born.
Oh do not take all that remains of him
To that dark Abbey—let his ashes lie
Beside the ones he ever loved so well
In the clean Earth beneath the country sky.
Fame is but passing show and vanity
Far more his love of Mother, sister, wife
Oh let him sleep his last Sleep near to them
Far from the seething roar of city life.
Westminster cannot hold the Soul of him
His shade, if it shall come to Earth again
Will not be there, but on that Egdon Heath
He ever loved in Sunshine or in rain.32
While this may not be a poem that deserves to be published in its own
right, it has value as evidence of local and ‘County’ resentment at Hardy’s
ashes being laid to rest in the Abbey, and at the violation of the integrity
of Hardy’s corpse. Neither of these poems was published and it may be
supposed that others of similar sentiments had been submitted, and were
rejected.
Though the decision was taken by Cockerell and Barrie, both of whom
returned to the wide world, it was Florence who had to live on at Max
Gate with the sense that she had failed to honour her husband’s wishes.
144 Charles Lock
Indeed, Cockerell did his very best to ensure that the public would think
that the Abbey funeral was Florence’s responsibility. On the evening of
Friday 13 January, just as the heart was being surgically removed at Max
Gate, this notice was placed by Cockerell in the Daily Mail :
Mrs. Hardy, after profound consideration, has accepted the Dean’s offer.
She felt that it was incumbent on her to do so in deference to the very strong
body of opinion in favour of the honour which has been offered. She felt
sure that although Mr. Hardy had expressed a wish to be buried in Stins-
ford Churchyard, near his home, the nation’s desire in this matter must be
obeyed.33
Hardy’s Will had allowed for its own invalidation by the clause positing
‘a separate paper’, yet this statement concocted by Cockerell makes no
mention of any such document. It might be taken to imply that there had
been no separate paper, for Cockerell places the entire weight of his case
on ‘the nation’s desire’, and none at all on any desire expressed by Hardy,
whether explicitly or implicitly. Forgoing any appeal to the writer’s own
wishes, Cockerell is constrained to advance an extraordinary claim: that
the ‘nation’s desire’ should outweigh Hardy’s Will, and even that a ‘very
strong body of opinion’ should outweigh the deceased’s testament over
the fate of his own body. It is not that the nation’s wishes should be ‘taken
into account’: no, they ‘must be obeyed’. And who first articulated the
nation’s desire? Cockerell, with the help of Barrie, had pre-empted ‘the
nation’s desire’ even before Hardy had died. And who first proposed to
the Dean of the Abbey that he should make an ‘offer’? It was certainly not
Florence. While the misrepresentation of Florence is blatant, we should
also question the accuracy of Cockerell’s representation of the Dean of
Westminster, the Very Revd. William Foxley Norris. Is this how a Dean
talks, or thinks? Cockerell seems to regard the Dean as not unlike a
museum director, on the look-out for a prestigious acquisition: let’s make
an offer on those ashes, they ought to bring in the crowds. Whatever the
Dean’s thoughts or intentions, however, Cockerell was not mistaken in the
consequences of that ‘offer’—and the Abbey owes him much.34
As a means of creating shrines to attract pilgrims, the distribution of
body-parts is a time-honoured practice, and one in which there should
be no less of the saint’s aura, or of the sacred, in a finger, a thighbone,
a heart, or the body entire. Might a writer be fully present, as a saint is,
in each of a number of locations where a part of the body solicits pil-
grimage? In secular times, a life tends to have its places distributed: of
birth, of education, of residence, of death, of burial. The devotion to
Hardy sustains not only two burial sites but the Birthplace (at Higher
Bockhampton) and Max Gate as properties regularly open to the public.
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 145
There is no other major writer, in Britain at least, whose body has been,
not by circumstance or accident (as with Shelley), but deliberately rent
and distributed, and whose end cannot be told in terms of a single final
resting-place. The occupants of other graves may be known to be incom-
plete but only of Hardy are we told both that his heart lies in Stinsford
and that his ashes are in the Abbey. At the Abbey the stone reads ‘Thomas
Hardy O M 1840 1928’ with no indication that anything less than the
whole is present.35 Some visitors to Poets’ Corner will assume Hardy to be
resting there in his wholeness; visitors to Stinsford Churchyard are given
a clue to an elsewhere in the wording ‘Here lies the heart of Thomas
Hardy’, and beneath, the explanation: ‘His ashes rest in Poets Corner
Westminster Abbey.’ Biographies of Hardy that attempt to narrate the
events of Monday 16 January 1928 are obliged to switch back and forth
between Florence and Kate in London with the ashes, and Henry with the
heart in Stinsford.36 It is hard to make coherence of that day and its con-
sequences; through all his life ‘a time-torn man’, Hardy has been severed
into eternity.37
Millgate labours at some length to solve the serious problems posed by
the ‘apparent non-survival’ of a separate paper, looking from every angle
into the possibility that Hardy might have wanted to leave a loophole so that,
should there be appropriate popular sentiment, he could be buried in West-
minster Abbey. Yet one can study that will over decades and find no way out
of perplexity. How could a lawyer commit such a fundamental mistake as to
allow the possibility of a not-yet-existing piece of paper to supersede the very
first paragraph of the will? A piece of paper yet to be addressed to the execu-
tors ought to be a codicil, and a codicil is by convention firmly attached
to the will; it is both discursively dependent and physically proximate. The
‘separate paper’ in Hardy’s Will is a phantom of a codicil.
On 17 October 1937 Florence Hardy died; she chose to be cremated,
and thus to share the fate of her husband whose cremation had been a
condition of burial in Poets’ Corner. Yet Hardy’s ashes in the Abbey will
never mingle with hers in Stinsford Churchyard. Florence’s ashes were
placed in the tomb in which Emma’s coffin was buried, with, at one end,
Hardy’s heart. Three in a grave: Hardy and Emma substantively there,
though Thomas only partially so; Florence there in ashes with Thomas’s
heart, his ashes elsewhere. Though two pairs are interred in one tomb,
neither pair can be thought united: these three, in one tomb, are from
each other in death divided.
After all that Florence had endured in consequence of the words—
‘according to consideration detailed in my directions to my Executors on
a separate paper’—it is no surprise to find that the lawyer who drew up
Florence’s Will was not Hardy’s lawyer. Nor is it with an unmixed sense of
146 Charles Lock
pride that the present writer records that the lawyer who drew up Hardy’s
Will was H. O. Lock, his grandfather.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Lock, Professor of English Literature at the University of
Copenhagen, was born and raised in Dorset. Educated at Oxford,
where his doctoral thesis was on John Cowper Powys, he taught for some
years at the University of Toronto. Author of Thomas Hardy: Criticism in
Focus (1992) and numerous essays on Hardy’s poetry, he is the Editor of
the Powys Journal. Recent essays include ‘A Quixotic Ramble along the
Strand’ (in StrandLines, 2019) and ‘Derelictions of Contentment: on the
locus amoenus in nineteenth-century landscape painting’, in Mutating
Idylls, ed. C. Meiner (Peter Lang, 2019). Among forthcoming articles
is one on the editio princeps of the Codex argenteus, held in the Library
of Uppsala University, and another on the city of Harbin understood
within the geo-politics of north-east Asia, in Japan’s Russia: Challenging
the East-West Paradigm, ed. O. Solovieva (Cambria, 2020). E-mail: lock@
hum.ku.dk.
WORKS CITED
Bond, Jonathon. ‘Pilgrimage to Lyonesse’ [on papers acquired by Eton College Library in
1975], Eton College Chronicle, 1980.
Dancy, John. Walter Oakeshott: A Diversity of Gifts. Norwich: Michael Russell, 1995.
Egremont, Max. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador, 2005.
Fincham, Tony. ‘Chairman’s Notes.’ Thomas Hardy Society Journal 15:2 (Summer 2019) 5–7.
Ford, Mark. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Hardy, Kate. Diary (ms. unpublished). Dorset County Museum.
Hardy, Thomas. Life’s Little Ironies. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894.
Hardy, Thomas. Satires of Circumstance. London: Macmillan, 1914.
Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, M. Millgate (ed.). London: Macmillan,
1984.
‘History of Modern Cremation in History of Modern Cremation in Great Britain from
1874: The First Hundred Years Great Britain from 1874: The First Hundred Years
(written in 1974 on the occasion of the Cremation Society’s centenary)’, The Cremation
Society, https://www.cremation.org.uk/history-of- cremation-in-the-united-kingdom.
Date accessed: 1 April 2020.
Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Millgate, Michael. Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992.
Millgate, Michael. (ed.). Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sassoon, Siegfried. ‘Catafalque.’ Eton College Chronicle 1980 (otherwise unpublished ms.).
Eton College Library.
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 147
Thomas Hardy’s Will and Other Wills of His Family: Monographs on the Life, Times and Works
of Thomas Hardy, no. 36. Guernsey C.I.: Toucan Press, 1967.
[Titterington, Nellie] Miss E.E.T. (Hardy’s Parlour-Maid). The Domestic Life of Thomas Hardy
(1921,1928). Beaminster: Toucan Press, 1963.
Wood Homer, Christine. ‘On Hearing that Thomas Hardy was to be buried at Westminster’
(ms. unpublished). Eton College Library.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1925–30, Anne Olivier Bell (ed.).
London: Hogarth Press, 1980.
NOTES
1 Ford, Mark. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner. Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press,
2016 (1), alluding to ‘Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, And in
their death they were not divided’ (2 Samuel 1:23). Among the best-known recensions
of the phrase in English literature are as the last words of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss
(1860), on the tomb holding Tom and Maggie Tulliver: ‘“In their death they were not
divided”.’ Note also the cr uel end of Hardy’s story, ‘The History of the Hardcombs’ (Life’s
Little Ironies, 1894): ‘The two halves, intended by Nature to make the perfect whole, had
failed in that result during their lives, t hough “in their death they were not divided”.’
2 Hardy, Thomas. ‘In Death Divided.’ Satires of Circumstance. London: Macmillan, 1914
(35–36). Cited here are the last two of the poem’s five stanzas.
3 The antithesis between the ‘rustic’ and the ‘stately’ is in the ms. between the Gothic and
the classic, which may put the empha sis on a divergence of aest hetic at titudes rather t han
of social class. The significance of this emendation was noted early, by A. S. McDowell,
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 1931 (141–142).
4 Thomas Hardy’s Will (1). On Hardy’s determination that Emma should be buried in
the plot already reser ved for himself and his wife at Stinsford, see Millgate, Michael.
Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 (446 – 447).
Hardy also erected to Emma’s memory a tablet in the church at St. Juliot, Cornwall
(idem (451)); in the poem ‘I Found Her Out There’ Emma’s shade is imaged as creeping
underground ‘Till it catch the sound/Of that western sea’ (Hardy, Thomas, 1914 (102)).
5 Thomas Hardy’s Will (6).
6 Cited in Dancy, John. Walter Oakeshott: a Diversity of Gifts. Nor wich: Michael Russell, 1995 (25).
7 Millgate, Michael, 2004 (414, 475, 487, 539), and Millgate, Michael. Testamentary Acts:
Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1992 (140–141).
8 Millgate, Michael (ed.). Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy. Oxford: at the Clarendon
Press, 1996 (261). This letter was sent on Sunday, followed by the urgent summons in a
telegram on Monday morning.
9 Millgate, Michael. 1992 (141); see note 21 on p. 246 : Cockerell’s Diar y for 12 January
1928 ‘refers to his conversation w ith Barrie at Max Gate on the 10th’.
10 Barrie arrived in Dorchester on Monday 9 January (Millgate, Michael, 2004 (530)), cor-
recting the date of Tuesday 10 January given in Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biog-
raphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 (571); he left on Tuesday, after one night
in a Dorchester hotel.
11 Millgate, Michael, 1992 (139–147), provides the most detailed account of the hours and
days follow ing Hardy’s death; this is more attentive to legal and procedural aspects than
the account in either Millgate, Michael, 1982 (570–578) or 20 04 (532– 540).
12 [Titterington, Nellie]. The Domestic Life of Thomas Hardy (1921–1928). Beaminster:
Toucan Press, 1963 (16); Millgate, Michael, 2004 (532). According to a letter to his wife,
148 Charles Lock
of 12 Januar y, Cockerell had, in the evening of 11 January, after Hardy’s death, gone into
Dorchester to send off other messages, before returning around 11 pm to sleep again at
Max Gate (Millgate, Michael, 1992 (141)).
13 Millgate, Michael, 1992 (140).
14 Diary of Kate Hardy (Dorset County Museum).
15 Millgate, M ichael, 1992 (143). In a letter of 16 Februar y 1928 to Hardy’s publisher, Daniel
Macmillan, Florence revealed a further grievance concerning ‘my husband’s “Instruc-
tions to my Executors” which are now filed in London, and which we are not allowed
to have back’ (Millgate, Michael (ed.), 1996 (269)). These ‘Instructions’ have never
been found and are presumably to be identified with ‘my directions to my Executors
on a separate paper’. That Florence was ‘not allowed’ to have them back would help
to account for the rapid deterioration in her relations with Cockerell; see Millgate,
Michael , 19 92 (160, 16 5 –16 8).
16 In conversation with R. L . Purdy, Cockerell asserted that t he heart-burial was Florence’s
idea; see Millgate, Michael, 1992 (247 note 41). This would be consistent with the notice
published by Cockerell in the Daily Mail imply ing that the initiative for the Abbey
funeral had come from Florence; Cockerell was keen to give the impression that he had
all along been following her wishes and respecting her notions. Decades later, Cockerell
attempted to justify his actions in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 22 Januar y
1954; see Millgate, Michael, 1992 (143–144).
17 Idem (145–146). The proposal of a ‘heart burial’ may have found support in a lecture
given to the Dorset Natural History and A rchaeological Societ y at the Dorset County
Museum, Dorchester, in the first half of December 1926 by the local antiquarian,
G. Dru Drur y, on ‘Heart Burials and Some Purbeck Marble Heart- Shrines’. An offprint
of this lecture (Dorchester, 1927) was found among the mail received at Max Gate
shortly before Hardy’s death; it had not been opened. See idem (145, 247, note 41).
18 Idem (146) records that Dr Mann took the biscuit-tin away and kept it at his home over-
night; Nellie Titterington gives another version: ‘After his death I attended his heart-
funera l at Stinsford. Until the funeral Mrs. Hardy had kept Mr. Hardy’s heart in my
biscuit-tin.’ ([Titterington, Nellie], 1963 (16)).
19 Ford, Mark, 2016 (facing 128) shows a rarely-printed photograph of the hearse leaving
Max Gate on Saturday morning, 14 January, and proceeding, accompanied by mourners
on foot, along the road to Dorchester, where the coffin would be placed on the train to
Woking. Millgate, Michael, 2004 (535) supposes that the coffin was carried in the hearse
all the way to Woking. (Hardy wa s cremated at Woking Crematorium, not at the quite
separate, though nearby, Brookwood Crematorium.).
20 ‘History of Modern Cremation in Histor y of Modern Cremation in Great Brita in
from 1874: The First Hundred Years Great Britain from 1874: The First Hundred Years
(written in 1974 on the occasion of the Cremation Society’s centenar y),’ https://www.crem-
ation.org.uk/history-of- cremation-in-the-united-kingdom. Date accessed : 1 April 2020.
21 William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, had insisted t hat his body be cremated; his
funera l in 1944 contributed to a considerable shift in the popular view of cremation,
especially among churchgoers.
22 A third service, of commemoration, was held at the very same hour in Dorchester. Each
service lasted for one hour. At 2 pm on Monday 16 January 1928, while one ser vice was
being held in London and another in Stinsford, the people of Dorchester gathered in
St. Peter’s (barely a mile across the meadows from Stinsford) to pay their respects to
Hardy as a fellow-townsman; the Mayor decreed that all shops in Dorchester should
be closed from 2 to 3 pm (see Millgate, Michael, 2004 (536)). It is worth noting that
in the earliest years of broadcast media, shar ing an experience from afar was still best
achieved by participation in a para llel rite held simultaneously. Only later—with the
Till Death Did Him Part: Thomas Hardy and His Funerals 149
most recent Coronation, or Churchill’s funeral—would the telev ised representation of
an event keep people at home, away from any simultaneous communal rite; later still,
large screens would be used to encourage ma ssed local gatherings in diverse locations,
as for Princess Diana’s funeral.
23 Diar y of K ate Hardy, 13 January 1928.
24 The most concise and accurate account of the formal aspects of the two funerals is pro-
vided by Harold Child and is printed as Appendix 1 in Hardy, Thomas. The Life and Work
of Thomas Hardy. M. Millgate (ed.). London: Macmillan, 1984 (485–486).
25 Woolf, Virginia. The Diar y of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1925–30. Anne Olivier Bell (ed.).
London: Hogarth Press, 1980 (173–174). A similar point was made in a letter to T.E.
Lawrence by Charlotte, wife of G. B. Shaw (Ford, Mark, 2016 (16)).
26 Diary of K ate Hardy, 16 January 1928.
27 Millgate, Michael, 2004 (535).
28 Millgate, Michael, 1992 (146).
29 Text printed in Millgate, Michael, 2004 (537).
30 Millgate, Michael (ed.), 1996 (266 note). This would account for the division of Shelley’s
corpse: his heart was ‘rescued’ by Trelawny from t he pyre on the beach at Viareggio.
Shelley’s ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, and decades later the
heart (by t hen in ashes, or dust) was buried in St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth.
31 Reproduced by per mission of the Estate of Siegfr ied Sassoon (Barbara Lev y Literar y
Agency) and of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College. This poem was first published in
the Eton College Chronicle 1980 accompany ing ‘Pilgrimage to Lyonesse’, Jonathon Bond’s
descript ion of papers acquired by Eton College Library in 1975: a series of letters from
Hardy to Sassoon, including the ms. of this unpublished poem. Partly quoted by Jeffrey
Meyers in ‘T homas Hardy & the War riors’, The New Criterion , 1 September 2002, t he enti re
poem is published for only the second time on the present occasion. For assistance with
the poems by Sassoon and by Christine Wood Homer, my thanks to Dr. Stephanie Coane,
Curator of Modern Collections, College Library, Eton College, to Sally Jennings, Collec-
tions Administrator, Eton College Librar y, and to Michael Meredith, retired Librar ian.
‘Catafalque’ has been little noted in Sassoon scholarship since 1980; Egremont, Ma x.
Siegfried Sassoon: a Biography. London: Picador, 2005 (311) has described it, oddly, as ‘a
pompous eleg y’. According to Egremont, ‘Cat afalque’ was rejected by the Time s, though
the extant ms. at Eton seems to be a draft not ready for submission.
32 Published w ith the consent of the poet’s nephew, Hugo Wood Homer of Bardolf Manor,
Puddletow n, Dorchester, and by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.
Though no poet’s name is g iven on the paper—a single leaf in manuscript, with one
version on each side—her nephew confirms that this is Christine Wood Homer’s hand.
33 Millgate, Michael, 1992 (145).
34 Space does not permit an account of the arguments, resolved within three days, over
whether Hardy was a Christian or sufficiently ‘churchy’ to be given a funeral in the
Abbey; see idem (141–143.) The ‘offer’ made by the Dean would follow a decision made
by the Chapter based on two criteria for inclusion in Poets’ Corner: literary merit and
Christian faith. The burial there immediately prev ious to Hardy’s was Tennyson’s, in
1892; Hardy was present (Millgate, Michael, 2004 (305)). We can ask: of all those in
Poets’ Corner, which one exercises the strongest pull on visitors today?
35 The memorial tablet for Hardy in Poets’ Corner became so worn—being set in the
floor—that a replacement was called for and a new stone was laid at a ceremony held on
18 May 2019. The former stone was donated by the Abbey to the Thomas Hardy Society
who intend to have it installed in Stinsford Church (Fincham, Tony, ‘Chairman’s Notes.’
Thomas Hardy Society Journal 15:2 (Summer 2019) (6)); this will no doubt lead to further
confusion, the sort likely to ensue when a label is preserved apart from what it labelled.
150 Charles Lock
36 The identity has recently been learnt of the stonemason who engraved the words on
the stone at Stinsford (see Figure 1), and who placed the heart-casket therein: Leonard
Hounsell (c.1891–c.1966). See the frust ratingly vague account: http://www.hou ns ell.
org.uk/hardy.ht m l. Date accessed: 1 April 2020.
37 Though there are parallels, the cases of Shelley and Chopin are not comparable to
Hardy’s in that the removal of the heart was undertaken by friends or relatives, and
Chopin’s heart was buried in secret. Neither of these dividings had any official autho-
rization, whereas the disposal of Hardy’s remains was sanctioned by the Establishment:
for one person, two funerals were conducted—according to the Rites and Ceremonies
of the Church of England by Law established.