...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.