Soon, however, his supplies failing him, he went away to raise money in Holland, but did not succeed. He then came to London, was arrested by his many creditors, and thrown into the King’s Bench. He took advantage of “the Act,” and registered his crown for the benefit of his creditors. On his liberation he did not know where to go, and went in a chair to the Portuguese Minister’s, whom he did not find at home. The fallen king, literally not possessing a sixpence in the world, was charitably taken in by a Soho tailor, fell ill the next day, and died; his coffin and interment were paid for by this worthy tradesman, who said he wished for once to have the credit of burying a king.
Another strange being was laid in the vaults, but only temporarily, in the year 1804. This was the eccentric Lord Camelford, whose adventures and intemperance were always exciting attention. He was shot in a duel by Captain Best, reputed the best shot in England, which was the odd reason given by his antagonist for meeting him. “Six quarts of blood,” we are told, were found in the cavity of his chest. All the denizens of Soho crowded round Mr. Dawes’s shop in Dean Street to see the crimson-velvet coffin, adorned with cherubim of silver and “wrought gripes,” as it lay in the St. Anne’s vaults, until the strange provision of his will could be carried out. It seems he had once passed many hours at a romantic spot by a lake in the Canton of Berne, where there were three trees. A sum of £1,000 was left to the proprietor, and he directed that his body should be transported thither and placed under one of the trees. There was to be no monument; he only wished “the surrounding scenery to smile upon my remains.”
Here also rests the beautiful maid of honour, Mary Bellenden, to whom the Prince of Wales showed his devotion, which was of an extravagant kind, by taking out his purse and counting his money. “If you go on counting your money,” said she, “I will run out of the room.” This beauty was secured by Colonel Campbell, later Duke of Argyll. Her royal admirer had made her promise that she would let him know whenever she made her selection; but she forgot, or omitted purposely, to do this. She thus incurred his bitter dislike; and whenever her duties compelled her to attend at Court, which she did with some alarm, this gracious person always took care to whisper some ill-natured speech. She did not live to share her husband’s honours, and now sleeps in the well-sanded vaults of the old Soho church.
Now taking flight across London to “the Marble Arch” and to the Queen’s Road, we reach the old Bayswater burying-ground, where it is assumed that one of our great humorists lies buried. It is not, however, generally known that there are well-founded doubts as to whether Yorick’s “dust” is to be found beneath his headstone, and whether the “mortal coil” he shuffled off in Bond Street has not been sacrilegiously transported away.
Sterne the recherché, the friend of wits and nobles in Paris as well as London, died on March 18, 1768, in mean lodgings, No. 41 Old Bond Street, a silk bag maker’s. Mr. Loftie, however, believes that the house was No. 39B, now Messrs. Agnew’s. The Shandean gave up the ghost piteously enough, abandoned by his family, and by a strange chance a footman, sent by a convivial party to inquire “how Mr. Sterne was,” arrived almost exactly at the moment of dissolution, and saw him pass away. This person was one James Macdonald, “own man” to Mr. “Fish” (so nicknamed) Crauford, a person of fashion; and he has recorded this curious incident in his valet-memoirs.
Now, this departure of poor Yorick was disastrous enough. His whole career, indeed, was one of eccentric gambadoes on his hobby-horse; but he never reckoned that after his death, yet another grimly grotesque chapter was to be added to his Shandy record. It was hard enough that so jocund a person should die so miserably—or, as he might have thought it, die at all; and there was a hideous contrast between the crowd which the viveur was always secure of, and this sad desertion.
But the funeral was in keeping. It might have been expected that a Canon of York, one holding the curacy of Coxwold, would have had many mourners; but the English humorist was attended to the grave by—how many will it be supposed?—two mourners! One was Becket, who published the defunct’s works; the other, old Sam Salt, one of Elia’s Benchers, a Shandean in his way, though why he attended seems as mysterious as why the others stayed away. This humble cortège took its way to the old burying-ground near Tyburn, and there, on the west side, poor Yorick’s remains were duly consigned to the earth.
More than a year passed away, when, in July, 1769, a strange report got into the papers: “It is rumoured that the body of Mr. Sterne, the ingenious author of Tristram Shandy, which was buried at Marylebone, has been taken up and anatomized by a surgeon at Oxford.” This must have astounded Hall-Stevenson and other jovial Shandeans. It was likely enough to be true. The meanness of his burial, the beggarly account of mourners, was a plain hint to the resurrection-men that here was a subject not likely to be watched or inquired after. The remains were certainly “lifted” and disposed of, like the late Mr. Gamp’s, “for the benefit of science.”
Mr. Edmund Malone, who had much of his friend Boswell’s taste for small gossip, tells us that he had heard that the body was sent to Cambridge, and sold to a surgeon there for dissection. He adds, that a friend of Sterne’s, coming in during the operations, told him that he at once recognized the features. This was the last outrage that poor Yorick could have dreamed of—worse than what befell his own Slawkenbergius, or the sufferers by the famous Tagliacotian operation. Yet there seems little reason for doubting Malone’s account.
There is a third version, which supplies even the name of the anatomist—one Mr. Charles Collignon, B.M. of Trinity, who died in 1785, and who on this occasion had invited some amateur anatomists to see him operate on “a subject” just received from London. After the recognition it was too late to suspend the dissection, which had nearly been completed. It is added that the friend of Mr. Sterne fainted away.