Hardy’s ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner at 2 p.m. on Monday 16 January 1928; a spadeful of his beloved Dorset soil being sprinkled on the casket. The last novelist to be buried there prior to this was Charles Dickens in 1870. Hardy had never been introduced to Dickens, a fellow champion of the poor and underprivileged, although he had attended some of his readings at the Hanover Square Rooms in London in the 1860s.
Present at the funeral were: Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin; leader of the opposition, Ramsay MacDonald; and the heads of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Queen’s College, Oxford. Sir James Barrie, John Galsworthy, Sir Edmund Gosse, A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw – all eminent literary figures of the day – acted as pallbearers. Members of the Macmillan publishing house, who also attended, organised the event.
Florence and Katharine were in attendance, but not so Henry, who was in poor health. In fact, Henry was at Stinsford church where, at the same time as the Westminster service, Hardy’s heart (which had been previously removed from his body) was being buried in the tomb of Emma, his first wife. (According to his cousin Teresa, Hardy in life had expressed the wish to be buried at Stinsford, ‘to lie with his own folk in the churchyard’. But it was not to be.)1 On the one side of Hardy and Emma’s tomb was that of his sister Mary, and on the other that of his parents, Thomas II and Jemima. Beyond that were buried his grandfather, Thomas I; his grandmother, Mary; his uncle, James, and finally, his aunt, Jane, and cousin, Theresa.
Also simultaneously with the Westminster ceremony, a memorial service to Hardy was held in Dorchester, in the presence of the mayor and corporation and many distinguished dignitaries.
Florence now set about ensuring that the memory of Hardy was preserved for posterity. In February 1928 she told Sir Edmund Gosse that: ‘With regard to the biography of my husband I have for many years been collecting material which has been put somewhat roughly into shape. T.H. allowed me to take a great many extracts from his diaries & notebooks, & supplied all the information that I required.’2
On 5 March 1928 Florence wrote to T.E.Lawrence, thanking him for his kind letters to her and saying:
besides my loneliness which will never be less, I have to suffer remorse, almost beyond expression, because I know I failed him at every turn. Time will not help me for I know my own nature, and I shall miss him more and more. The thought of years that may have to be lived through without him fills me with terror. There was really nothing in my life except T.H. nor will there ever be.3
Published by Macmillan in October 1928, nine months after Hardy’s death, the collection of poems entitled Winter Words contain yet more thinly disguised sentiments about Emma. In To Louisa in the Lane, Hardy declares, ‘Wait, I must, till with flung off flesh I follow you’, but in Song to Aurore he issues a caveat:
We’ll not begin again to love
It only leads to pain …
And in The Destined Pair he ponders on whether ‘Fate’ would have been ‘kinder … Had he failed to find her’ (had he never met Emma in the first place).
An outsider, who was unfamiliar with the personal circumstances of Hardy’s marriage to Emma, might miss altogether the possible relevance of another poem in his Winter Words collection:
Henley Regatta
She looks from the window: still it pours down direly,
And the avenue drips. She cannot go, she fears;
And the Regatta will be spoilt entirely;
And she sheds half-crazed tears.
Regatta Day and rain come on together
Again, years after. Gutters trickle loud;
But Nancy cares not. She knows nought of weather,
Or of the Henley crowd:
She’s a Regatta, quite her own. Inanely
She laughs in the asylum as she floats
Within a water-tub, which she calls ‘Henley’,
Her little paper boats.
Imagine for a moment that Hardy and Emma are in London for the season, and that they have decided to attend the Henley Royal Regatta – traditionally held at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. It is raining, and Emma (‘Nancy’) therefore declines to go. Years later, at the time when the regatta is being held, Emma behaves childishly and makes some paper boats. By this time she has become so deluded that she believes the Henley Regatta is taking place in her bath, in which she is floating her home-made boats. In other words, she has created her own ‘asylum’.
(Some might argue that this poem applies not to Emma, but to someone else. However, circumstantial evidence makes this an unlikely proposition.)
Following the death of Hardy’s brother, Henry, on 9 December 1928, Gordon Gifford expressed the desire to attend the funeral. Said Florence: ‘That will not suit Katie [Hardy’s sister, Katharine], I fear, though a more harmless & well-meaning man [than Gifford] could not exist.’4
On 11 July 1929 Florence wrote to Siegfried Sassoon to say: ‘I do not think I shall take a house in London, or make any change in my life. I feel that I belong to Max Gate where I can visit Stinsford & go to see my husband’s sister [Katharine] every few days.’5
That September Florence paid a visit to St Juliot, ‘to the great pleasure of the solitary little clergyman who lives there’ (the Revd David Rhys Morris). However, despite the ‘atmosphere of romance’, Florence found the experience ‘all very sad’.6
On 10 January 1931 Florence declared: ‘With regard to the letters written by T.H. to E.L.G. – afterwards E.L. H. [Emma] – it was she who burnt his letters, & he told me he much regretted that at the time, & since. She asked him for her letters to him which he had carefully preserved, & she burnt those too.’7
Florence continued to live at Max Gate until her death there on 15 October 1937, after a long illness. She is buried in Stinsford churchyard in the tomb of Hardy and his first wife, Emma. In her will she directed that Max Gate and its contents be sold at auction. In the event, Hardy’s sister Katharine purchased the property (even though she continued to live at Talbothays), and when she herself died in October 1940, the property was left to the National Trust. (Hardy’s boyhood home at Higher Bockhampton also now belongs to the National Trust.)