...The popularly accepted version of the story at this point, begun during Isabel’s own lifetime and strenuously denied by her, but nevertheless accepted by virtually every Burton biographer in this century, is that on the day after Richard’s death she locked herself in the room and systematically burned all of his personal papers, diaries and erotic manuscripts, beginning with The Scented Garden. It is claimed or suggested that her motive for this was sheer prudery and ignorance, and in the case of his diaries her discovery that Richard had written derogatively of their relationship and/or of his own homosexual proclivities. Most of this is, demonstrably, myth.Isabel says she worked alone ‘for sixteen days, sorting and classifying his manuscripts, packing and arranging his books, and carrying out his last wishes and written instructions. What a terrible time it was . . . in solitude and refusing all offers of assistance.’
We know Isabel did not labour exclusively at her lone sorting and classifying task, even during those first sixteen days; she responded to a huge number of letters during the same period and spent several hours a day praying beside Richard’s coffin. But it was a massive chore simply to sort and pack the library of 8,000 volumes. ‘I have so much to do with his books and MSS,’ she wrote to Arbuthnot.
It requires little imagination to appreciate the amount of practical work involved in Isabel’s leaving Trieste. She could not bring herself to sell the furniture; ‘it would be like selling one’s friends,’ she said. She gave most of the items to the orphanage and the hospital, while the better pieces went to friends (including Lisa) as keepsakes. A few treasured pieces were packed to send home, including Richard’s favourite chair and the deal table with the red pen-wiper still tied to the leg, upon which he had written The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
So what did Isabel burn in Trieste? We know for sure that she burned two copies of The Scented Garden; the one that Mrs Maylor called ‘the manuscript’, and a carbon copy she had made on Richard’s instruction. Later Isabel would say that Richard himself had already burned the original manuscript ‘he burnt all his original manuscripts concerning it, and I helped him. Apart from this, we know that Isabel burned the huge unwanted accumulated paperwork of an eighteen-year residence in Trieste; paperwork which she thought not important enough to warrant being shipped home, just as she had burned unwanted papers in Santos and on leaving Damascus. But she shipped back to England, eventually, 200 packing cases which contained the books and papers from Trieste, that she believed warranted preserving. She also destroyed a few erotic books which appeared on a list for burning left by Richard, but some of the titles on this list were shipped home for burning at a later date, when she had time.
At the same time Isabel also had her own accumulated papers, books and mss. to sort and pack. Again, some of these she burned because she considered them to be of no value, such as her unpublished manuscript, ‘The Sixth Sense’.
Isabel did in fact confide in a clergyman – not her ‘peasant priest’ but her cousin, Canon Waterman, who had been in Rome and went to stay with her during January, some ten weeks after The Scented Garden was burned. Significantly, despite Waterman’s visit, we know that all the erotic papers upon which Richard had been working in the months prior to his death were subsequently packed and shipped to England.
It should also be noted that the fire of Daisy Letchford’s memory was the small grate in Richard’s bedroom-cum-study – not a huge garden bonfire. Undoubtedly there was a good deal of burning of paperwork, we already know this from Isabel’s own account. Apart from receipts and domestic detritus, there were ‘a lot of private papers which I knew nobody ought to see but myself, and much that he particularly desired me to burn if anything happened to him,’ she said. But there was no great burning of Burton’s manuscripts as such, with the exception of The Scented Garden.
There was a burning of Richard’s papers, but it took place much later, and not at Isabel’s hands. We can be sure of this because she painstakingly wrote out an inventory of the contents of the boxes she packed at Trieste, and this surviving document can be compared with a similar inventory made six years later, after Isabel’s death, by her secretary.
Meanwhile there were other matters to see to, and the most important of these was the resting place for Richard’s body in England. Friends wrote suggesting Westminster Abbey and made enquiries of the Dean, who replied that it was impossible to bury any more people at the Abbey. Isabel’s reaction was off-hand, ‘nor can I say that I was very sorry.’
Neither did St Paul’s offer. I saved our dignity by taking the initiative, following a line of our own, and refused before I was asked . . . In these churches a showman could . . . earn . . . a sixpence by pointing out a cold, dark slab to trippers and saying, ‘There lies Burton, Speke, Livingstone’ . . . and many others, some of whom were not fit to tie the latchet of his shoe.
She was desperately anxious to accede to the wishes Richard had expressed during their walk a few months earlier; ‘he hated darkness so much that he would never have the blind down lest he might lose a glimpse of light from twilight to dawn.’ But she could not think how to enable them to lie ‘side by side in a tent’ until she thought of the Taj Mahal and conceived the idea of a small mausoleum. She would build ‘an Arab tent . . . made of dark Forest of Dean stone and white Carrara marble’, where filtered light could be admitted and where Richard’s coffin could lie above ground on a bier. Her letter in November to Messrs Dyke, Stonemasons of Highgate, commissioned a structure based on the tent the Burtons had used in Syria. It was not – as some have written – a Bedouin tent (i.e. the low black traditional tent of the desert) but a tall white structure, designed by Richard and made in Damascus, in which he was not obliged to stoop and which they used on many journeys.
In England there was talk in the press of forming a national committee to decide where Burton’s remains were to rest but Isabel wrote to the Morning Post, explaining her plans and inviting instead donations for the stone tent which would enable her to fulfil what she regarded as his wish. In return, she said, she would leave to the nation after her death a library of all his works, a number of paintings of him, and memorabilia concerning his major expeditions. The resulting public subscription eventually raised £665 towards the total cost of £674 for the tomb and the English funeral. Her appeal also alerted the press and others to the fact that she had been left in straitened circumstances. A group which included Francis Galton, Lord Salisbury, W.H. Smith, Lady Stanley and Lord Northbrook subsequently petitioned the Queen to provide Isabel with a small pension from the Civil List. To Isabel’s grateful surprise, she learned in January that an annual pension of £150 had been granted to her for life.
On 27 January Isabel left for England. She took with her 25 packing cases of the most valuable and essential belongings, but the mass of books, papers and heavy luggage (housed in 175 cases) had to remain in storage with friends, for she could not afford to ship them at that time. Dr Baker accompanied her and Canon Waterman travelled part of the way with them. Without the power of attorney, and without Letchford and Jones to lend him support, Baker reverted to the role of inoffensive, concerned protector.
Having done what she considered her duty, Isabel went straight to London where her three sisters were waiting for her at the Langham Hotel in Piccadilly. Baker left her at this point, to go and live with his mother. Isabel could hardly have been surprised at Maria’s attitude; it was not new. She was obviously sad that even after Richard’s death they could not be friends, but she was far more upset to learn that because of adverse weather it had proved impossible to quarry the stone for the tented mausoleum. The earliest anticipated completion date, she was told, was May – three months away. She went next day to the cemetery at Mortlake where many of her family were buried. Her last visit had been with Richard; he had looked at the headstones of her mother, brothers and uncles, and commented that it was ‘like a private club’. She chose a plot near the boundary wall and had the area pegged out so that a base could be laid down to take the structure. On the following day she went north to meet the S.S. Palmyra at Liverpool, and accompanied the coffin as it was conveyed by train to Euston, and by hearse to Mortlake. She had arranged for it to lie in the crypt under the altar, until the marble and stone tent was ready.
Isabel had now done everything there was to do. She had brought Richard safely home, she had worked without pause since his death, packing and leaving the life she had built up and loved over eighteen years, and she had been travelling continually for the past two weeks. Suddenly, there were no immediate calls on her courage. She collapsed, exhausted, and at last gave way to the tears she had previously been unable to cry, and to the pain of her cancer which was always threatening to overwhelm her.She spent the next month in her rooms at the Langham Hotel, grieving and ill, never going out. When she could she made a desultory start at answering the massive backlog of condolence letters which sat in a large box on the floor beside her desk. To all her correspondents she spoke of the impossibility of facing up to the magnitude of her loss; she felt as though she had suffered a 'severe blow to the head . . . I was completely stunned.' To a few, very close friends, she confided the ordeal of the weeks in Trieste when she was working furiously to clear and pack the house and settle their affairs; and of her fear when those upon whom she most relied had turned on her; 'during that time I swam through a sea of small horrors – wickedness, treachery, threats; but . . . I pulled through.'⁵⁰
It was June before the tent was completed at Mortlake. The press were intrigued: ‘The appearance of a tent is well maintained . . . lighted from . . . a small stained glass window. Within, the Oriental style . . . is maintained by a number of beautiful lamps . . . Four are suspended from the ceiling and shed a dim . . . light through jewel-shaped facets of coloured glass . . . the floor is of white Carrara Marble and on each side are coffin bearers about six inches high for the coffins of Sir Richard, and eventually Lady Burton.’⁵³Any suggestion that the Oriental structure with its crescents and fringes and stars was alien in a Catholic churchyard was overcome by a crucifix and other symbols of Christianity inside and out. Isabel was pleased with it, and was at last able to send out announcements of the funeral service on thick, black-edged cards: ‘. . . It will take place on the 15th of June at St Mary Magdalene’s Church, Mortlake at eleven o’clock. Train [from London] leaves Waterloo at 10.00 a.m. and reaches Mortlake at 10.47. The station is a few yards from the church.’⁵⁴Five hundred people attended; four hundred declined, many of whom – as in the case of Lord and Lady Salisbury – intended to accept but were subsequently unable to do so when a late outbreak of Asiatic influenza infected thousands in the capital during May and June.
Her palpably great sorrow was blended with a dignity that was almost majesty. Her mien was upright, her step firm, her glance straight before her . . . the long semi-aquiline nose would have made the face hard but for the large soft eyes, the rounded cheek, and the tender yet firm mouth, tremulous now with suffering . . . There was a respectful curiosity to gaze upon the features of this woman as she moved slowly . . . towards the mausoleum . . . [carrying] a simple bunch of forget-me-nots . . . [which she] placed on the coffin.$^{55}$A few days before this dignified display Isabel had done a foolish thing. One might have thought that she would have learned some discretion from the controversy caused by injudicious letters to the press from her and Richard in Syria, and over her Jane Digby obituary. Apparently not. Gossip clearly originating from Baker – that she had burned Richard’s manuscripts and papers – reached her, and she acted with characteristic impulsiveness, writing her answer to the Morning Post. She had already alienated a number of Richard’s friends by mentioning the Catholic rites at his death-bed in the press. Now she proceeded to acquire the condemnation of a good many of the remainder. She justified the letter because, she said, some 1,500 potential subscribers had been expecting to receive The Scented Garden and she was unable to cope with the correspondence. There had also been, she said, ‘a great deal of talk and excitement as to what manuscripts he [Richard] might have left behind.’
She had received, she said, many exhortations ‘not to burn them, not to lose them, not to bury the MSS. in my husband’s coffin . . . asking me to put them at the disposal of this society or that, or from individuals writing on a certain subject . . . I have guarded every scrap of his writing as jealously as if it were the Holy Grail. After [his death] . . . I locked up his rooms, knowing there were many things which . . . should be private between ourselves. Some took exception to that, but one cannot please everybody and I had only to think of him.’ She explained how she took sixteen days to sift and classify the papers and manuscripts; ‘I know them as a shepherd knows his sheep. I have worked with him for 30 years and have been told everything . . . I know all his plans and only in one incidence have I not cooperated:I now have a terrible confession to make . . . one which I know will close a great many houses against me and deprive me of friends whom I value . . . but I want to sail under no false colours . . . My husband had been collecting for fourteen years information and materials on a certain subject . . . Some days [after he died] I read this . . . No promise had been exacted from me and I remained for three days in a state of perfect torture as to what I ought to do about it. ‘Bury it’ said one advisor . . . ‘Get a man to do it for you,’ said No. 2 . . . I tested one man who was very earnest about it . . . ‘don’t let my name get mixed up in it, but it is a very beautiful book I know.’
. . . I sat down before the fire at dark . . . My heart said ‘You can have 6000 guineas; your husband worked for you, kept you in a happy home, with honour and respect for thirty years. How are you going to reward him? That your wretched body may be fed and clothed and warmed for a few miserable months or years’ . . . it would be just parallel with the original 30 pieces of silver. I fetched the MS, two large volumes . . . Still my thoughts were ‘was it a sacrifice?’ Will he rise up in his grave and curse me or bless me? The thought will haunt me to death . . . And then I said, not for 6,000 gns [nor] 6,000,000 gns will I risk it. Sorrowfully . . . in fear and trembling I burnt sheet after sheet until the whole of the volumes was consumed. She was certainly right in one respect. The doors of many former friends were henceforward closed to her. The press took up the story and sizzled with innuendo about the subject matter of the burned papers. Too late Isabel realised the value of the maxim, ‘never explain and never apologise’. She had condemned herself and would come to bitterly regret her confession (though, she said, never the act itself). In vain did she protest, ‘he had 35 years experience of me, as a fiancé and as a wife, and he knew right well what I should do with that particular manuscript. He meant to bring it out had he lived, but he never meant anyone else to bring it out.
Some of her critics said she was simply ‘an uneducated woman’. ‘I am not going to deny it,’ she responded. ‘But my husband found that I had quite sufficient common sense to trust me unreservedly with the whole of his business of whatever nature for thirty years, and never had cause to regret it, nor did he ever do the slightest thing without consulting me.’⁶¹ Isabel would publish further justifications of her behaviour, hoping to correct the colourful but generally inaccurate perceptions of events in Trieste, but the damage was done. The exaggerated story of the ‘death-bed conversion’ (implying baptism rather than the administration of last rites to an existing member of the Church), along with the ‘book-burning holocaust’, was already.