The desire that there should be placed in the coffin letters written to the testator by his wife before their marriage is intelligible, and the request was made recently in a minister’s will. A contemporary record of the death in 1788 of Frances Marchioness Dowager of Tweeddale makes much of such tender provisions. “She lived a great example of prudence and penurious economy, and in her death gave testimony of the goodness of her heart, united with wisdom, in the legacies and orders respecting her own funeral, and her surviving relatives and friends. An instance of conjugal affection, rarely to be found in the life and death of great personages, is more fully evinced by her living 26 years a dowager, ordering her burial with her wedding-ring on her finger, and the letters of her dear Lord to be put into the coffin with her, and to be laid as near as possible to her deceased husband.”
Unintelligible, however, to any not initiated into the mysteries of testators’ minds are some of these directions or desires:—
“After my decease, I desire that a competent and trustworthy doctor of medicine shall thoroughly satisfy himself that life is absolutely extinct. My carcase is to be cremated, and the residuum thereof deposited in two metal urns, numbered respectively 1 and 2. On the ashes in No. 1 are to be placed a packet, which will be found on my desk, and my miniature portrait scarf-pin, and on the ashes in urn No. 2 a similar packet, which will also be found on my desk, and my miniature portrait finger-ring.”
“I direct that I shall be buried in the clothes in which I shall die, whether they be day clothes or night clothes, and after my death my body is not to be washed or in any way whatsoever meddled with, and no funeral service shall be held over my remains anywhere.”
Another testator directed that his body should be burnt or cremated, and the ashes placed in a glass or earthenware jar. A porcelain vase was then to be made large enough to contain this jar, and to bear his name and the date of his death. A vault was to be built of great strength and solidity, to contain at least six vases, a suitable inscription on the exterior. When these operations should be complete, the glass jar was to be placed within the vase, and the lid of the vase put on with a strong cement to exclude the air, the vase then to be deposited in the vault and to remain there for ever.
John Baskerville, who died at Birmingham, 1775, directed that his body should be buried in a conical building, in his own premises, “heretofore used as a mill, which I have lately raised higher and painted, and in a vault which I have prepared for it. This doubtless to many will appear a whim; perhaps it is so, but it is a whim for many years resolved upon, as I have a hearty contempt of all superstition, the farce of a consecrated ground ...” and other ideas, pleasanter to omit and illustrative of the unreasonableness of eighteenth-century reason. His epitaph was to run as follows:—
“Stranger, Beneath this cone, in unconsecrated ground, A friend to the liberties of mankind directed His body to be inurned. May the example contribute to emancipate Thy mind From the idle fears of Superstition And the wicked Arts of Priesthood.”
John Baskerville endeavours to give at least some idea of the motives underlying his behests. So Major Peter Labelliere, whose mind was said to have been unhinged by hopeless love, by politics and religion, chose for his burial a spot on Box Hill, where about the beginning of the nineteenth century he was interred with his head downwards, in order that as “the world was turned topsy-turvy, he might be right at last.”
In the register of Lymington Church under the year 1736 is the entry: “Samuel Baldwin, Esq. sojourner in this parish, was immersed, without the Needles, sans cérémonie, May 20.” The explanation, according to Wm. Hone in his “Table Book,” is that this was done in consequence of the deceased’s earnest wish, to disappoint the intention of his wife, who had repeatedly assured him that, if she survived, she would wreak her revenge by dancing on his grave.
The artist W. P. Firth, like many others in recent times, requested that his body should be cremated, saying that “the duty of the individual to his kind includes providing for such final disposal of his body as shall be least detrimental to those who survive him, and that the modern process of incineration provides the quickest and safest mode of such disposal.”