Wills and Will Making/1

by Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald

WILLS AND WILL MAKING.

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Of all the dark corners into which the human soul retires when it has some doubtful business on hand, some of the very darkest and most unpleasant are found to be those selected for making a will. Think of the thousands of furious fathers "cutting off" their children for some marriage disapproved of; giving out that they are asserting paternal rights—in reality, revenging themselves because of thwarted ambition and greedy hopes. Think of the line of old sinners darning up their wicked lives with bequests to hospitals and charities, to which they would not give a shilling till what they have is no longer theirs. Think of the lurid death-bed scenes, the act delayed until almost too late; the cormorants crowding round, the lawyers and clergy waiting the interval of indifferent consciousness, the pen guided, and the faltering signature. Think of the "low comedian" will-maker, who chuckles over services invited all his life, over the hopes held out, the significant word dropped, and who revels in the picture of the day when the will is read which gives all to one whom he has never seen, and disappoints the parasites. What would he not give to be present at that most exquisite of scenes? By wills and will-making hangs a cloud of the most intensely dramatic elements, and it is no wonder that so great a master of the human comedy as Balzac, should have played again and again on these disagreeable but seducing chords, and have loved to create misers, and hungry and greedy heirs. The philosophy and interest of the study is founded on the most absorbing and genuine situations; for the will-maker is put to a curious test, and must face his own meaner passions and interests. He must make up his mind to deal with the matter, as if he himself was out of the question. He must deal with himself as though he were dead, though he does not like to do so. So with the attitude of others, more or less dependent, towards the will-maker. A penetrating cynic will laugh to see how the best and most virtuous, once this magnet is held towards them, find themselves unconsciously playing a new part.

We may think, also, what a real touchstone this will-making becomes as a test for true righteousness. The complacently just, deceiving themselves, cannot there deceive others. The thin veil is torn off from their motives; an act of "strict justice" is seen at once to be the gratification of intolerance, or spite, or revenge. Proctors declare that thousands of wills are being destroyed and have been destroyed. The decent, virtuous gentleman who would cut off his right hand, as he thinks, sooner than commit an offence akin to those for which lower creatures are placed in the dock, sometimes mistakes the fear of detection and disgrace, the want of suitable temptation, for inflexible principle; and the lucky and respectable heir, who has come into possession through no will being found, often has discovered among the papers, or between the leaves of a book, the fatal stray sheet which will deprive him of all. It is certain that hundreds have succumbed to this terrible test. The most perfect instance of the victory of principle is the Irish one, told by Sir Bernard Burke, and which deserved a crown of virtue indeed, and would have had public recognition from any other state than our own.

A Dublin barrister named Carroll was brought up in the confidence that he was to inherit an estate of a relative, which he managed, and which was indeed his only prospect of support. The relative died, and he found himself in possession. Some dispute arising with a tenant about a lease, he came to Dublin to search, and after much trouble found it, with a whole bundle of others, in an old trunk at the top of the stairs. Going over them at night, a paper dropped out, which proved to be a will, leaving the whole away to an illegitimate daughter, whom the Carrolls were at that moment supporting. The luckless barrister did not hesitate. He was alone. It was a tiny scrap. There was a candle beside him. His first act was to consult a barrister as to whether it was a legally drawn will; he owed that, at least, to his family. He was told it was. He took the mail, went down to his family, and placed the paper in the hands of the girl who had become entitled. For him it was literally beggary. He soon after died, and with difficulty some friends procured for his wife the matronship of a jail. It is impossible to give enough credit to this noble act, which exhibited an act of religion in its purest shape, precipitating every particle of motive.

One of the most curious features in this "Revenge by Will," is the many times it has deceived the ends of the will-makers. A very remarkable instance occurred not many years ago in a family known to the writer. It has an air of compensation at the end, quite suitable to a drama.

A gentleman of large fortune was married to a lady of some attractions. For a time they lived very happily; but soon a disagreeable and ill-conditioned temper began to be exhibited in the husband. This later turned to a positive dislike, quite undeserved on the wife's side, and which deepened into a malignant hatred. Her forbearance and temper carried on matters with tolerable smoothness for some years, when the husband was seized with an illness that proved fatal, and he went out of the world in the old ill-conditioned way that he had lived. Her friends were congratulating themselves on this release, and as she had but a slender settlement, it was known that all his large fortune must come to her. When his will, however, was opened, it was found that everything was left away from her—artful and ingenious devices had been used to deprive her of the smallest article of property—and, with an almost diabolical malignity, a last blow was given: "And I make this disposition, for a reason that she herself best knows." This scandalous insinuation only recoiled on the head of the testator; for her friends knew her character too well, and the charitable set down this ungoverned hatred to something akin to insanity. The lady accepted her lot with great sweetness and resignation. Not long after, a relative, who was an eminent barrister, happened to be talking to one of the witnesses to the will in the street. Suddenly a gentleman passed them.

"There's a coincidence," said the eminent barrister. "There's your fellow-witness, A.B."

"Oh, was he?" said the other carelessly. "I didn't know."

"What!" exclaimed the barrister.

A question or two, and it came out that the two witnesses had signed at different times.

We may conceive the delight with which the barrister—a sympathising friend—received this news. The will collapsed of itself, like a crazy house, without even a legal proceeding; and the lady, like a heroine, was triumphantly restored to her rights and honours. One might almost wish that her baffled lord had been allowed one peep from his grave, to know the failure of his malignant efforts.

It would be a curious study to analyse the feelings of those odd testators when, pen in hand, they sat down to dispose of their own remains, after some truly fantastic fashion. There is a whole line of these eccentrics; indeed, they are to be expected in the ordinary course of nature. It would seem that with this unbounded power of disposition comes also a sort of fitful fancy akin to the caprices of a sick person, or it may be ascribed to an exaggerated and morbid sense of self-importance. However this may be, the instances of this shape of extravagance are innumerable. There have been legions of testators insanely and jealously solicitous lest the mortal tenement they left behind them should go down to the clay, or come in contact with worms or clods; and yet the same persons, had they to suffer amputation of a leg or an arm, could scarcely be uneasy as to what was done with their severed limb. The tourist both in England and Ireland, travelling along by-roads, is sometimes pointed out a house with a peculiarly-shaped roof, and is then told a story of some oddity of a Dives who had left, to the great torment of his executors, some very strict and minute directions as to the putting away of his body above ground in the roof. Sometimes this arrangement is to be accounted for through the observances of some fancied legal condition, as where a lease has been granted for so long a time "as the lessee shall be over ground;" and though the law-courts would have very soon shown that this was not a carrying out of the spirit of the agreement, the baffled heirs might not have cared to take the trouble of making a new disposition of the remains, and would have left them where they were.

About the year seventeen hundred and twenty-four, people who passed by Stevenage had a bill thrust into their hands inviting them to visit an old hovel that once belonged to a certain Henry Trigg, and "where," added the bill, "his remains are still upon the rafters of the west-end of the hovel, and may be viewed by any traveller who may think it worthy of notice." The former tenant of the remains thus disposed of, had made his last will almost entirely, it would seem, with a view to secure the gratification of this peculiar idiosyncrasy. He began it with that sort of complacent and even jubilant strain of piety, which is common, however, to all testators. "I, Henry Trigg, grocer," he wrote, "being very infirm and weak in body, but of perfect sound mind and memory, praised be God for it, do give my soul to God; as to my body, I commit it to the west-end of my hovel, to be decently laid there upon a floor erected by my executors, upon the purlins, nothing doubting, but that at the great resurrection I will receive the same again."

All his property, with the exception of some slight legacies, he bequeathed to his brother, a clergyman, provided he strictly carried out this condition; if he should be disinclined to do so, it was to go to a second brother on the same condition; should he refuse, it passed to a nephew on the same terms. The whole wound up with a number of bequests, varying in amount from a guinea downwards to one shilling, and even the shilling and guinea were not to pass to the legatee until three years after his decease.

Some of these cases are, of course, due to sheer insanity, in others to an almost grotesque spirit of mischief, but in a far larger class they may be set down as the outpourings of arrogance; as who should say, "I have the wealth, the will, and the power, and am entitled, if I choose it, to make my whims and humours attend on what I give." Under which category is to be classed that Mr. Tuke, of Rotherham, who died in 1810, leaving a testamentary disposition that must have been the delight and amusement of the district. He left a penny to every child that should attend his funeral, to the utter disorganisation of, or certain holiday at, every school for miles round. The result was, that some seven hundred flocked to pay this tribute of respect: they received the allotted reward. This could have been no yearning towards infant life, for he was a notorious and churlish miser of the Scrooge pattern. To every poor woman in the parish was left the sum of one shilling. The only legacies of respectable amount were those that had reference to the glorification of his poor old remains—half a guinea was left to the bellringers "to strike off one peal of grand bobs" at the precise moment he was put down into the clay. Seven of the oldest navvies were to receive a guinea for "puddling him up" in his grave. There must have been great merriment and general hilarity at these odd obsequies. His more serious dispositions were quite in keeping. To a daughter he left four guineas; but to his old and faithful servant twenty guineas a year. To an old woman, "who had for eleven years tucked him up in bed," was bequeathed the sum of one guinea. Finally, he set apart a sort of endowment to supply forty dozen penny loaves, which, at noon on every Christmas-day for ever, were to be thrown down from the steeple of the parish church. These ridiculous fancies were no doubt the offspring of a petty vanity wishing to obtain the most fuss and publicity at a very cheap rate—tinged also with a wish to leave some trouble behind him.

Akin to this testator must have been Oliver the Miller, who died about seventy years ago. He seems to have had a strange fancy for the colour popularly associated with millers and their men, and perhaps their hats. He was interred in a choice spot, and close to his mill, in a tomb made by himself some thirty years before, and in a coffin which had reposed many years under his bed. It was all painted white, and was carried by eight men harmoniously dressed in the same colour; a young girl, twelve years old, officiated as clergyman, and preached a sermon at the edge of the grave. Now, again, it may be asked, what pleasure could Oliver have found in the anticipation of these grotesque rites?

To the pure Tartuffe element the preparation of these instruments is specially favourable. It is attended also by the love of authorship, with the tolerable certainty that the composition will be received with a favour and consideration it could not obtain under other circumstances, and when dealing with less important matters. When the testator takes pen in hand, the temptation is to enlarge on his own piety—that is, on his own personal defects and shortcomings—but as it were challenging contradiction. The feeling in the reader's mind is to be, "Here is this rich man, yet how humble, how good, how he acknowledges his faults!" Of this pattern, too, are the testators who bequeath trifling articles, each accompanied with a sort of homily supposed to be of far greater value. Here, again, in dealing with the reception of both these articles, a Molière or Balzac has the most delightful field for dramatic effect, in the disgust and impatience of the legatee, and the struggle between a decent deportment, and disappointment. Thus, a Yorkshireman, Mr. North, who died in 1773, went into an elaborate catalogue of pennyworth trifles, ballasted by an intolerable quantity of what he thought sack. "I give," said this gentleman, "to Mrs. R. G., my English walnut bureau, made large to contain clothes, but hope she will not forget when she makes use of it that graces and virtue are a lady's most ornamental dress." We may conceive the toss of the head and contemptuous sniff with which this double present was received; with, perhaps, a "like his impudence! his old trumpery rattletrap!" If testators are sincere in wishing their parting advice to go home and benefit the recipient, they must surely know that their best chance is to balance it handsomely; just as a person wishing to send a note over a wall to a prisoner wraps a heavy stone up in it. This gentleman also gave his old sword to a lieutenant, "hoping, if ever occasion require it, he will convince a rash world he has learnt to obey his God as well as his general." No doubt the officer welcomed this present with the choice words then fashionable in the army. Having disposed of his property, the testator then took "this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to the Grand Original Proprietor," a phrase that recals the speech of a strolling manager which the writer once heard, and who, in announcing the fresh engagements he proposed making, devotionally qualified his intentions, by submission to the decrees of "The Great Manager of All!" "All my faults and follies," goes on the testator, "almost infinite as they have been, I leave behind me, with wishes that they may be buried. My infant graces and embryo virtues are, I trust, gone before me into heaven." This is a faithful precedent.

One would have liked a peep into the wicked old heart of a certain Lambeth parishioner, who died in 1772, and in whose fingers the pen must have quivered with rage and senile spite. No doubt the revenge was unfelt by its object, who must have long since given up all hope of receiving anything from his bounty, as indeed he also knew. He—and people like him—had only the bare satisfaction of a profitless spite. "Whereas," wrote this precious testator, "it was my misfortune to be made very uneasy by Elizabeth G., my wife, for many years, by her turbulent behaviour, for she was not content with despising my admonition, but she contrived every method to make me unhappy. She was so perverse in her nature that she would not be reclaimed, but seemed only to be born to be a plague to me. The strength of Samson, the knowledge of Homer, the prudence of Augustus, the cunning of Pyrrhus, the patience of Job, the subtilty of Hannibal, and the watchfulness of Hermogenes, could not have been sufficient to subdue her. And as we have lived separate and apart from each other eight years, and she having perverted her son to leave and totally abandon me, therefore I give her one shilling only." The shilling thus contemptuously left was not meant, as is sometimes supposed, as a compliance with the letter of some obsolete legal form, which required that the object should be mentioned, in some shape, in the will. It was meant as an evidence that the testator was aware of what he was doing, and had not omitted the person thus marked out, through forgetfulness.

An old Welshman, Mr. Morgan, within two years of a hundred, left all he had to his "old faithful housekeeper," with, however, this good-humoured "hit" at her. "She is a tolerably good woman, but would be much better if she had not so clamorous a tongue."

That wealthy Mrs. Gatford, of Horsham, who died in 1799, was certainly "odd" during the later years of her life. For twenty years she had never gone out once, and though she kept a carriage, it was seen gradually rotting away in the coach-house until it fell to pieces. Her horses lived luxuriously all that time, enjoying the richest pastures, and doing as they pleased. But, at the end, the main portion of her will was found to be sane enough, as she left nearly all to the poor, with the exception of fifteen pounds a year for the support of her cats and dogs. She was of the class that is morbidly solicitous as to what is done with their remains, a feeling that is intelligible if not pushed too far, as in the present instance. She ordered that her remains were to be kept a whole month in her room, and to be diligently washed in spirits every night to keep away decomposition. She was to be then laid in no less than four coffins, and the outer one was to be of marble. All these directions were strictly carried out. Even this feeling, morbid as it is, is more excusable than that of the man who "does not care what is done with his carcase," and says they "may throw him out on a dunghill if they like." We can understand, too, the feeling that thinks of "a sweet spot" under trees or aisles, and longs to be laid there, but scarcely that selfishness which imposes upon sorrowing relatives the weary duty of gratifying a whim, and of bearing away the dead to some distant spot in a foreign land, which was once seen and fancied. No one can conceive the inconvenience, misery, and cost of these mortuary shifting deportations. The wish for extra coffins is in many a dread of the dreadful co-tenants of the grave, and those who have shrunk from rats and worms during their lifetime, cannot endure that such intruders should visit their remains unchecked. When such precautions are assured they die easier. Thus it was that the late Sir Philip Crampton—Sir Walter Scott's Crampton—who died only a few years ago, left directions that his coffin should be filled up with plaster of Paris "to keep away the rats," which was accordingly done. We may imagine this dismal and grotesque operation in presence of the relatives, the plasterers pouring in their liquid material, the gradual covering in of the poor relics, the last glimpses, and the final "setting" in one hard mass. It was of this physician, when a public testimonial was being planned, to be set up in a public burying-ground to his memory, that a truly witty remark was made by a brother of the profession, who, arguing the needlessness of such a commemoration, applied a famous inscription. "For," he said, "si monumentum quæris circumspice."

The remaining curious specimens on our list, of wills and will-making, must be reserved for another chapter next week.