by Ian Ker
Both Chesterton and Frances had thought his recovery twenty years before had been a miracle, and now Frances ‘did not dare to pray for another miracle’.104 On 12 June she wrote to tell Father O’Connor that Chesterton was ‘very seriously ill. The main trouble is heart and kidney and an amount of fluid in the body that sets up a dropsical condition. I have had a specialist to see him, who says that though he is desperately ill there is a fighting chance. I think possibly he is a little better today.’105 He had been given the last rites by the parish priest, Monsignor Smith, that morning. In response to a message from Frances, his friend Father Vincent McNabb, the famous Dominican preacher and a leading Distributist, came to see him for the last time. He sang the ‘Salve Regina’, the hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary that is always sung over a dying Dominican, at Chesterton’s bedside, and kissed his pen that lay on a table beside his bed.106 Next day Frances was in his room when he regained consciousness. ‘Hello, my darling,’ he said, and then, seeing Dorothy Collins was also in the room, ‘Hello, my dear.’107 They were his last words before again losing consciousness.
On Sunday 14 June Frances wrote to inform O’Connor that their ‘beloved Gilbert passed away this morning at 10.15. He was unconscious for some time before but had received the Last Sacraments and Extreme Unction while he was still in possession of his understanding …’.108 One of the two male nurses who were looking after Chesterton had been called out of morning Mass by Dorothy Collins, who suspected there ‘must have been a local press agent in the congregation, for before lunch, the press from London were at the door’.109 The death certificate listed three causes of death, which had essentially resulted from heart failure.110
The ‘introit’ or opening antiphon of the Mass of that Sunday, 14 June, began: ‘The Lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large place.’ Dom Ignatius Rice noted that even Chesterton’s memorial card, on which was printed the introit, thus contained a joke: the good Lord had made allowance for his size when he came for him. To the words of the ‘introit’ Frances added some lines written by Walter de la Mare in support of Chesterton’s candidature for the rectorship of Edinburgh University.111
Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way
Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;
The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
Pity and innocence his heart at rest.112
The funeral took place ten days later on 24 June. The Mass was celebrated by Monsignor Smith, in the presence of Archbishop Hinsley of Westminster and Bishop Youens of Northampton, at the parish church.113 It was a ‘glorious day’, the kind of weather Frances so liked and Chesterton so little cared for. In response to popular demand, the funeral cortege did not take the direct route to the cemetery in Shepherd’s Lane but did a detour to pass through the old town.114 The policeman at the gate to the cemetery told Edward Macdonald: ‘Most of the lads are on duty, else they would all have been here.’115
Father, now Monsignor, O’Connor was unable to attend, as he was ill in bed with bronchitis.116 Maurice Baring also was too ill to attend, but wrote to Frances: ‘There is nothing to be said, is there, except that our loss, and especially yours, is his gain.’117 Ronald Knox, too, was unable to attend, but wrote to Frances that Chesterton had been his ‘idol’ ever since reading as a schoolboy The Napoleon of Notting Hill. That he, Knox, had retained ‘the Faith’ when so many of his friends had lost it ‘was due, I think, under God to him … I don’t think he can be long for Purgatory’.118 For Belloc, it had been ‘a great benediction to know him’.119
Afterwards at Top Meadow Frances remained in her room, where Maisie Ward and a few others saw her for a little while. To Keith’ Chesterton, with what Maisie Ward called ‘that utter self-forgetfulness that was hers’, Frances said: ‘It was so much worse for you. You had Cecil for such a short time.’120 Unsurprisingly, ‘Keith’ was much less sympathetic in her account. She thought Frances should not have refused to let the press know how ill Chesterton was—he was after all a public figure and a journalist himself. But Dorothy Collins took Frances’s side, and when a reporter from a daily newspaper did call he was told nothing.121 Dorothy Collins’s version is rather different. According to her, two days before Chesterton died, E. C. Bentley came to visit him, but his old friend was too ill to see him. That afternoon the Daily Mail rang to say that they had heard he was ill. Dorothy admitted he was, but persuaded them not to release the news, as Chesterton had to be ‘kept very quiet and we must not have telephones and doorbells’. Bentley, who was himself a journalist, could not believe that the paper would keep its promise, but it did.122 The news of Chesterton’s death therefore came as a great shock to many people. ‘Keith’ considered Frances’s refusal to cooperate in any way with the press ‘the final expression of the long, long struggle she waged against those forces which drew her husband ever so little from his home’. Frances told ‘Keith’ how ‘ridiculous’ she had found it in America when women would telephone her to ask what it felt like to be the wife of a genius: ‘I told them that Gilbert’s genius was not the important thing to me; what really mattered was the sort of husband he was …’. After the funeral, ‘Keith’ complained, little had been done to provide refreshments for the guests. Frances had retired to her room, leaving the guests in the studio: ‘A few ladylike sandwiches, with sherry, spread on a long table, disappeared with the first arrivals. Forlorn little groups stood about the garden, others crowded the hall and inner rooms, and I was sorry for Belloc, who tired and hungry was looking vainly for refreshment.’ When it became clear that no more food would be forthcoming, the guests departed without being able to express their condolences to Frances. ‘Keith’, of course, made no allowances for Frances’s grief and the fact that she was a very private person at the best of times. Nor did Eric Gill’s gravestone meet with her approval: ‘Personally I do not think this memorial to Gilbert suggests either the poet’s flaming spirit or that combination of faith and fantasy which made him unique.’123 In her sustained attack on Frances in her book The Chestertons (1941), Keith’ makes no mention of the fact that, when she died, Frances left £500 to her Cecil Houses and £1,000 to herself, the same sums that Chesterton had left her, no small sums in those days.124
But if, predictably, nothing done by poor Frances in despised Beacons-field met with ‘Keith’s’ approval, the requiem Mass that was celebrated in Westminster Cathedral on Saturday 27 June delighted her. ‘The pageantry, the tumult, the trumpetings of his genius were made manifest,’ and Ronald Knox ‘preached one of the most eloquent valedictories the building can have heard’.125 Having been unable to attend the funeral because of illness, Monsignor O’Connor was invited by Archbishop Hinsley to celebrate the Mass,126 assisted by Father Vincent McNabb and Dom Ignatius Rice, who had been present when O’Connor received Chesterton into the Catholic Church in a very different kind of building. The day after Chesterton’s death, Rice had written to O’Connor, grateful to him for having invited him to be present at the reception. ‘It is extraordinary’, he wrote, how much love G.K.C. drew to himself.’127
In his sermon Knox began by calling Chesterton ‘a prophet, in an age of false prophets’. Not the least of his prophecies had been that human liberties were threatened’. But on this occasion it was appropriate to emphasize Chesterton’s religious beliefs. He had been the ‘spear-head’ of the religious reaction against nineteenth-century evolutionary materialism, even though this reaction was ‘decimated’ by the First World War. Famed for his ‘absent-mindedness’, Chesterton was reputed to have asked: ‘Am in Liverpool; where ought I to be?’ It had taken him fourteen years after the publication of Orthodoxy ‘to find out that he ought to be in Rome’. Chesterton had once written: ‘If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.’ Well, Chesterton had ‘looked for the thousandth time at the Catholic Faith, and for the first time he saw it’. Knox end
ed by speaking of Chesterton’s ‘unbelievable humility’, which had been a more effective document of Catholic verity than any word even he wrote’.128 Afterwards he wrote to Frances to say that he felt that he had been ‘horribly impersonal and inhuman, as if at such a moment what a man did mattered to his friends more than what he was’.129
On the day of the requiem Mass, O’Connor heard the story that H. G. Wells had said: ‘If ever I get to heaven, presuming there is a Heaven, it will be by the intervention of Gilbert Chesterton.’130 A couple of years earlier, he had told Chesterton: ‘If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.’ In reply, Chesterton assured Wells that, if he, Chesterton, turned out to be ‘right’, than Wells would ‘triumph, not by being a friend of mine, but by being a friend of Man …’. He did have one complaint, though: he wished that those who embraced ‘the old Agnosticism of my boyhood’ would remember that people like Chesterton also began as free-thinkers … and there was no earthly power but thinking to drive us on the way we went’.131
As for G. G. Coulton, he had already sent his condolences to Dorothy Collins, saying that he had ‘admired’ Chesterton for the sincerity of his conversion … a conversion from which he can have hoped for no worldly advantage but, on the contrary, an addition to his work and a certain cloud over his popularity’.132 Dorothy replied that Chesterton had ‘never made an enemy in all his controversies; as differences of opinion never influenced his personal feelings for anyone’.133 In the end, without the extra material, Coulton was unable to publish the correspondence in the Listener, and decided not to publish at his own expense what he called a ‘cold controversy’.134
Telegrams from Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State and the future Pope Pius XII, on behalf of Pope Pius XI, were sent to both Frances and Archbishop Hinsley. The telegram to Hinsley, which was read out in Westminster Cathedral, referred to Chesterton as a ‘gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith’. No one would have been more amused than Chesterton to be thus associated in death with Henry VIII, who, before his break with Rome, had been given the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ (the initials of the Latin title ‘Fidei defensor’ are still on British coins alongside the name of the reigning monarch) by the then Pope for his defence of the seven sacraments against Luther. Because the Pope had conferred what was traditionally a royal title on a subject, the secular press did not print the telegram in full.135
Among the letters of condolence that Frances received was one from Shaw, written the day after Chesterton’s death:
It seems the most ridiculous thing in the world that I, 18 years older than Gilbert, should be heartlessly surviving him.
However, this is only to say that if you have any temporal bothers that I can remove, a line on a postcard (or three figures) will be sufficient.
The trumpets are sounding for him; and the slightest interruption must be intolerable.136
Frances was ‘very moved at the generous offer’, according to Dorothy Collins, but she did not take it up, as she was ‘adequately provided for’.137 When the Autobiography was published in November, Shaw wrote again to Frances: ‘It is really an ANGELIC book. I can’t find any other word for it; and it has never occurred to me to apply it to any book before.’138 According to T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, Shaw always’ called Chesterton ‘a man of colossal genius’.139
On 21 July Frances wrote to O’Connor: ‘I find it increasingly difficult to keep going. The feeling that he needs me no longer is almost unbearable. How do lovers love without each other? We were always lovers.’ She was having a weekly Mass said for him at the parish church—‘but I feel it is more for the repose of my soul than for his’.140 Her sense of loss grew rather than lessened. On 25 October she wrote again to O’Connor: I seem to feel his loss more and more. It does not get easier to bear as time goes on.’141
On the gravestone that ‘Keith’ felt unworthy of Chesterton, Frances had inscribed the last words of the last verse of St Thomas Aquinas’s hymn ‘Verbum supernum’, the penultimate verse of which, beginning ‘O salutaris hostia’, is traditionally sung at the service of Benediction.
… vitam sine
Termino
Nobis donet in patria.
‘May He grant us life without end in our native land.’ As a definition of Heaven, Chesterton had often quoted the two Latin words in patria’: It tells you everything: “our native land”.’142
Two and a half years after Chesterton’s death, Frances herself died of cancer on 12 December 1938. Her last days were spent in the nursing home run by the sisters of Bon Secours in Candlemas Lane, Beaconsfield. Her husband’s last public function, immediately on his return from France at the end of May 1936, had been to open a garden fête in aid of an extension to the nursing home.143
INDEX
Alexander, George 143
Allenby, Edmund 407–8
Allenby, Lady 415
Allport, Nellie 361
Amery, L. S. 318–19
Amis, Kingsley 190 n.65
Aquinas, St Thomas 48, 154, 681–90, 728–9
Archer, William 349–51
Arians 527
Aristophanes 88
Aristotle 683–6
Arnold, Matthew 155, 335–7, 340, 353, 379, 503, 564, 612–14, 667
Asquith, H. H. 156–7, 309, 318–19, 348, 351
Athanasius, St 526–7
Auden, W. H. 68
Augustine, St 689
Augustine of Canterbury, St 250–1
Austen, Jane 405
Aytoun, William 13
Baccani, Attilio 11
Baden-Powell, Robert 122
Bakewell, George 79 n.7, 206 n.28, 355–6
Baldwin, Stanley 619–20
Balfour, A. J. 99, 146, 156, 251, 318, 320, 420
Baring, Maurice 293–4, 368, 390, 395, 407–8, 415, 428–30, 460, 466, 469–70 477–8 487, 489, 510 724
Barker, Dudley 97 n.55, 98 n.59, 131 n.37
Barker, Harley Granville 145–6, 348–50
Barrie, J. M. 141–2, 348–51, 717
Bastable, Rhoda 77, 81, 163, 541, 553, 580
Beecham, Thomas 378, 395
Beerbohm, Max 110–11, 122, 141–2, 608–9, 700
Bell, Bernard Iddings 547–8
Belloc, Elodie 65, 73, 110, 141, 314, 347–8, 477
Belloc, Hilaire 51, 63–6, 73, 82–3, 141, 146, 160, 198–200 234–7, 251, 261–3, 281 293–4 297, 314, 318, 320–1, 324, 327, 345, 347–8, 352, 355, 366, 368, 370–1, 377, 391, 394–8, 407, 419, 422, 467, 472–3, 476–8, 491, 495, 498, 512, 531–2, 561, 575, 584–6, 618–20, 678, 691, 699, 724–5
Benedict, St 504
Bennett, Arnold 92 n.35, 352
Bentham, Jeremy 329
Bentley, Edmund Clerihew 14, 16–17, 19–21, 21–2, 27–8, 35, 37, 40–1, 44, 48, 61–4, 70, 81, 187, 192, 315, 407, 500, 619, 725
Berkeley, Anthony see Anthony Berkeley Cox
Betjeman, John 91
Bewsher, Samuel 13–14
Bismarck, Otto von 327, 713–14
Bixler, Anna 633–6, 640, 642
Bixler, Delhard 633–6, 640, 642
Bixler, Delphine 634–5, 640, 642
Blake, William 271, 274–6, 328, 506
Blatchford, Robert 24, 42, 97, 115–20, 146, 160, 212, 246, 500, 546
Blogg, Blanche 45–6, 59, 81, 676
Blogg, Ethel 44, 48–9, 163
Blogg, Frances see Chesterton, Frances
Blogg, Gertrude 53, 55–7, 68, 75
Blogg, Knollys 48, 203–6, 230
Borlase, Mr and Mrs 473, 555
Bosanquet, Theodora 198
Boswell, James 144, 609–11
Bourne, Francis 575, 691
Bowden, J. W. 314
Bowden, Sebastian 314
Boyd, Ian 126 n.28
Bridges, Horace J. 637, 655
Bridges, Robert 40
Brontë, Charlotte 100
Brown, Ford Madox 369
Browning, Robert 35, 330, 340–1, 427, 680
Buchan, John 294, 375–6
Burke, Edmund 382
Cadbury, George 74, 93, 157, 326–7, 351
Calvin, John 590, 707, 714
Campbell-Bannerman, Henry 281
Carey, John 92 n.35
Carlyle, Thomas 104, 106, 151–2, 165, 329–30, 332–7, 340, 379, 533, 609, 613, 695, 722
Carson, Edward 312–13, 315, 318