Mysterious Wisdom (45 page)

Palmer, throughout More's rural sojourn, was kept by his work in London where the discovery of the bodies of two dead cats in his garden further added to the city's more general miasma. He had caught a spring cold and felt fit for nothing but lying on the sofa and dozing. Every now and then he would dispatch fretful missives to his family, ticking More off for addressing a letter incorrectly, pontificating on the benefits of fresh milk, recommending shin-of-beef soup simmered down into a delicious jelly, reminding Herbert, who on first arriving in the country had been temporarily struck blind by a bad case of sunstroke, to remember always to carry his parasol.

In May the weather took an abrupt turn for the worse. As a damp eastern wind set in and a dirty yellow fog descended over the capital, Palmer began to grow fearful that his son was in too exposed a spot. Anxious letters fluttered back and forth between Kensington and High Ashes as Palmer discussed the possibility of joining his family, worrying that there would be no space for him in the cramped accommodation, vexed by the cost of renting an extra room and dispatching More to the neighbouring farm to inquire about empty lofts.

While he was in the country, More received a congratulatory letter from a school friend to tell him that, on top of other awards, he had won the Latin prize, even though he had written only fifty of the hundred lines set. It was better news than his father could send. At the Old Watercolour Society exhibition his works had been dismally hung. The committee excused itself by saying that his pictures were so powerful that nothing could stand against them; but the outcome was that only three of the seven works submitted had been sold. The painter was in low spirits. ‘If this should be the last time I write to you – let me
beseech
you to “remember your Creator in the days of your youth”,'
10
he wrote morbidly to his son. He could not have known that this would indeed be the last letter he would ever send his son. Instead of growing stronger, More suffered a relapse.

Many years later Hannah still recalled the morning of her husband's arrival at High Ashes farm. More, sitting at the table, had looked suddenly up and said: ‘I fear I shall not be able to stand up to receive my father when he comes.'
11
He had rallied a little however in the ensuing days and found that, with the help of a stick, he could walk. A little donkey chaise was procured and, twice a day, propped up with pillows and with his mother walking beside him, he was jogged along through the shade of the pines. Meanwhile, Palmer's spirits also began to pick up. He strolled through the woods to watch the sheep being washed in a mill pond and sketched the shearing and branding that was taking place at the farm. He wandered the high slopes and looked out across vaporous views. He was beginning to feel happy in this rural spot.

Embarking on a series of watercolours, he started dreaming of extending his stay – he could get twice as much work done when away from Kensington, he said. He made inquiries as to renting a cottage for the winter and, writing to the Gilchrists who lived in Guildford and to James Clarke Hook, a nautical painter and Etching Club member who lived in Hindhead, he asked if either of them had heard of anywhere. Typically, the brief became progressively more fastidious: it was not just a cottage he needed, but one which was high, with a dry soil, a westerly aspect and a railway close by. But soon he had other concerns to distract him. More took a sudden turn for the worse again. ‘Pray excuse the . . . incoherent scrawl,' Palmer ended a letter to Gilchrist: ‘Poor More's illness quite upsets my brain.'
12

By the time Palmer had consulted an eminent surgeon and fellow Etching Club member, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, it was far too late. As he marshalled his thoughts with a few hasty memoranda, it was plain quite how grave More's condition had become. In ‘frequent and distressing pain', Palmer scribbled: ‘unable to walk but by effort. Dreadfully depressed irritable and nervous . . . frightened . . . talks of his grave and his shroud – asks us to let him alone that he may die . . . Complains of tender breezes on a hot day as chilly.'
13
For more than a year he had shown an extreme sensitivity to noise, Palmer reported, and for even longer than that his hands had been trembling. When out in the donkey chaise, he had begged to come home after three-quarters of an hour. Even the slightest toss of the animal's head had seemed to startle him. He complained of a dull pain. Hannah saw in his eyes the distressed look of an epileptic she knew.

Sir Francis Haden's answer is lost. It is possible that More was suffering from severe heart disease following his attacks of rheumatic and scarlet fever, or that he had a cerebral tumour or a leak of blood in the brain. It is doubtful whether a diagnosis from Haden would have helped: and even if it could have, arriving on 11 July, it arrived too late.

In the evening of Wednesday 10 July, Thomas More fell into a dreadful and protracted fit. His parents were distraught. A farm lad was dispatched to fetch the Redgraves and, though the artist was away, his wife Rose roused a garden boy to carry the lantern and made her way quickly through the dark pine woods. Doctors were sent for; but High Ashes was isolated. Nothing could be done in the interim. Rose stayed up with the family all night. But shortly before dawn, More slipped into a coma and by quarter to six on the morning of 11 July 1861, without ever waking, he had died.

Palmer was not beside him at the moment that he finally passed away. On hearing that his first-born was dead he uttered an awful ringing cry and rushed from the house in a bewildered agony, never to re-enter again. The doctor, arriving too late to do anything for the original patient, was by now more concerned about his parents. Palmer, forced into a carriage, was driven to the house of his brother-in-law James Linnell, and Herbert too was taken there. But the grief-stricken Hannah remained. Even after her father arrived, trying to persuade her to come back to Redstone, she stayed by More's side. ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead,' Linnell told her. But Rose Redgrave stood firm against his bullying: ‘I will not allow you to carry off your daughter till her son is buried,' she said.

 

 

Palmer could not bear to attend his son's funeral. It took place a few days later in the nearby village of Abinger. ‘The lark has risen, and birds are singing in the oak wood, but this . . . is the last day on which anything of the dear one whom I have cherished will appear above earth,' he wrote as he sat at his window, watching the dawn breaking, his heart aching with loss. ‘Our birthday was the same . . . Jany. 27. O! that today I could be laid beside him,'
14
he cried.

The loyal George Richmond was there at the graveside; his son Willie was beside him. The boy had come down a little earlier to try to comfort Hannah and, bidding a final farewell to his childhood companion, had sketched a last portrait as a memento for his parents. It was a gift for which Palmer would always be grateful. ‘I would not lose it for the world,'
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he said. But it would be a long time before he could even bring himself to look at it and he was later to ask Willie if he would make another drawing, only this time showing More as if he were still living – ‘if it were only a pencil line that might keep before me his
living look
', he implored.
16
Calvert and Gilchrist were also there in the churchyard and, though it wasn't the custom for women to attend funerals, Hannah crept down in the twilight that evening to stand by the side of the newly filled grave.

The gravestone was chosen after much discussion with Gilchrist. The mourning Palmer, welcoming the distraction offered by this small employment, managed to rouse a faint spark of his former spirit and began searching for masons, discussing the prices and haulage costs of pieces of Portland stone and weighing the tasteful simplicity of a London designer with the cheaper local productions of a Guildford stone yard. But it was Hannah who did most of the travelling to Surrey to make arrangements for this monument, and it was Gilchrist who planted the flowers around it. Palmer would not visit the grave or even go near it, he said, until it was opened to place him forever at his boy's side.

 

 

Palmer's heart had been torn up by the roots. From the depths of his despair he cried out to his friends, writing on black-edged paper first to Calvert – for it had been he who had been ‘first in kindness when dear little Mary was called away'
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– then to Richmond and Finch. Their love came to feel doubly precious to him in his time of grief. But though there were many – from the tactful and attentive Gilchrist to the bereft Mrs George – to offer their condolences, each fresh reminder only rubbed his wounds raw. ‘Here is the consummation of all our twilight walks and poetic dreams,'
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he wrote bitterly to Richmond. He had been smitten by a blow from which he could never fully recover and, but for his last son, dear Herbert, he said, he and Hannah could only hope that their own lives should soon end.

Every morning he would rise to an appalling sense of absence. He would struggle through his days searching only for distraction. And even in sleep he could find little rest: he was tormented by dreams in which he saw his son alive again, felt his arms round his neck or heard his voice singing. The whole terrible scenario had been only a nightmare, the boy would say, and for a second, after waking, a sense of surging joy would remain before reality seeped back in and the knell of despair rang once again in his head: ‘More
is
dead More
is
dead'.
19

Palmer had never assumed that his life would be easy, but he had believed that honest industry would lead him to a tranquil old age; he had dreamt of the ‘attachment and veneration of children'
20
and yearned to leave behind him at least one who might ‘grow up to atone by a wise and useful life for all the bread and beef I have eaten'.
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Now all this had been snatched away from him: ‘swallowed up in “a darkness that may be felt”'.
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‘What
can we
do who are left behind?'
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he pleaded. Turning to Richmond, helpless as a child in his ‘low grovelling agony', he bared his grief. ‘We are . . . like wrecked sailors on a spar drifting we know not whither,'
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he wrote. ‘The great deep of the heart and the understanding is broken up . . . and strange dark shapes move about like those said to have been seen in that first eruption of Vesuvius.'
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Palmer was tempted to ‘moral suicide', to a doubting of divine goodness. Who could tell how much more suffering he could bear, he wondered? His eyelids had become stiff with weeping. Who could plumb the empty depths of human misery, he cried?

For month after month, he stumbled helplessly on. His health began seriously to flag. By September the doctors had become gravely concerned. Palmer was ordered to drink strong beef tea every four hours day and night. But life to him had become an insupportable burden. He felt crushed by its weight and, though occasional echoes of his former self survived – ‘Affectionately yours, A Vapour'
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he subscribed a letter to Richmond, just one of several almost playfully self-deprecating monikers (‘the eel', the ‘crushed worm', ‘sand of the desert') that he at this time adopted – his letters, crossed with erasures, scattered with staccato exclamations, were outpourings of pure grief. ‘O! that the dead could speak to us,'
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he mourned. But they couldn't: and the silence was almost too much for him to bear.