Mary Horne, it will be noticed, wished to be kept as long as possible before her burial. She does not give a reason, but it was presumably to lessen the risk of premature burial, the possibility of which haunts many minds. Seven years before her death Dr. William Hawes had published his “Address on Premature Death, and Premature Interment,” and still to-day the subject is one of importance, as the Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial can testify. Recently a testator expressed a wish either to be cremated or that his heart should be pierced, as “I feel assured that many persons are buried alive.” Now and then sensational stories appear, as of rappings in a coffin or of the revival of one about to be interred. “All I recommend,” said James Clegg, “is not to be lain under ground alive,” and what he recommends is often anxiously striven against. Such efforts were made by Ann West (ob. 1803) who once was nearly buried alive, by directing that she should be buried in a coffin without a lid, and that a hole should be left in the brickwork of her vault. It was even said that she bequeathed her fortune to a servant on condition that he should place bread and water on her coffin for a year in case she should revive and need them. But perhaps all was not well at last, for her ghost was said to haunt the neighbourhood.
A similar tale is told of a Manchester lady, a Miss Bexwick or Beswick, who died about the middle of the eighteenth century, and devised an estate to her doctor and others, on condition that the doctor paid her a morning visit for twelve months after her death. To fulfil the conditions it was necessary to embalm her body, and the doctor resided in the house to pay the mummy his daily call.
Horatio Mucklow, of Highbury (ob. July 27, 1816), bequeathed a legacy to Powell the parish clerk, on condition that he would see his head severed from his body previous to burial, and Thomas Trigge, of St. George, Southwark (will dated February 24, 1755, and proved November 25, 1784), directed that before he was shut up in his coffin a surgeon should give him such a wound as would prove immediately fatal were he alive. Such drastic methods are not uncommon to-day. The late Lord Burton wrote: “I desire that before my body be placed in the coffin the spine and spinal marrow of the neck shall be completely severed by a competent surgeon and the heart removed and placed in a separate vessel, to be enclosed in the coffin,” and presumably the risk of premature burial was in his mind. “I have a great horror of being buried alive,” wrote a lady in her will, “therefore I wish my finger to be cut,” and she bequeathed £10 to the doctor performing such service. Another ordered a doctor to “thrust a dagger through my heart three times to make sure I am dead.” Better thus than to be buried alive: such a stuffy death, as Yum-Yum says in “The Mikado.”
Dorcas Hutchinson, of St. Anne, Soho (will proved June 3, 1761), was content with a less drastic method. “I mean by my desire above written not to be enclosed in any coffin whatever within seven days after my decease; that my corpse be laid upon a bed during that time, and may not be put into any covered coffin until the eighth day. My will is that Edward Havel my present servant may take care that the above request is literally complied with, and for that purpose may stay in the house till I am buried, and upon his so doing I do bequeath him the sum of £50.”
For such a method there is much to be said, if after apparent death a prolongation of life be desired, but the method is unfortunately not conclusive. “Everybody has heard,” writes John Timbs, “of the lady who was buried, being supposed dead, and who bearing with her to the tomb, on her finger, a ring of rare price, this was the means of her being rescued from her charnel prison-house. A butler in the family of the lady, having his cupidity excited, entered the vault at midnight in order to possess himself of the ring, and in removing it from the finger the body was restored to consciousness and made her way in her grave-clothes to her mansion. She lived many years afterwards before she was finally consigned to the vault.”
On Saturday, October 29, 1808, Elizabeth Emma Thomas was buried at Islington, and on Monday this inscription was raised:—
“In Memory Of Mrs. Elizabeth Emma Thomas Who died the 28th October, 1808, Aged 27 years.
She had no fault save what travellers give the moon: Her light was lovely, but she died too soon.”
Suspicion was aroused from the rapidity of her burial, the grave opened, and the body removed into the church for inspection. Suspicion seemed justified when a large wire pin was found thrust through her left side and fixed in her heart. But it appeared from the evidence that this was done at her own desire, to prevent the possibility of being buried alive, and the jury returned a verdict accordingly: “Died by the visitation of God.”
But the preceding is a digression on the way to simplicity. With such an expression as “I commit ... my body to the deep or any convenient place, it’s immaterial where,” we reach down to the minimum, and must ascend again. “To them,” says Jeremy Taylor, “it is all one, whether they be carried forth upon a chariot or a wooden bier; whether they rot in the air or on the earth; whether they be devoured by fishes or by worms, by birds or by sepulchral dogs, by water or by fire, or by delay”; but man is often in nothing so eccentric as in his desires for the disposal of his remains, or in the accompaniments and accoutrements he asks for his obsequies.