Dust, dirt, and silence; the cadaver tomb, Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, West Sussex

I visited the Fitzalan chapel in Arundel principally to see the rare and famous cadaver tomb of John Fitzalan, the 7th Earl of Arundel (1408 – 1435) but found that there was much more to see in a place where the Earls of Arundel and Dukes of Norfolk have been interred for more than 600 years. The chapel itself is unique in England; although it occupies the chancel of the Anglican parish church of St Nicholas it is the private property of the Dukes of Norfolk and has a separate entrance in the castle grounds. The Norfolks were famous recusants during the reformation and the chapel has remained a Roman Catholic place of worship throughout its 650-year history. The current church was founded in 1380, by Richard the 4^th Earl of Arundel, as a collegiate chapel but he is not buried here. The 4th Earl rebelled against King Richard II and was executed for high treason in 1397. Some say that ‘Torment me not long, strike off my head in one blow,’ were his last words, pleading with the executioner to make a clean job of it, others claim his corpse stood up after the fatal slice and, headless as it was, still managed a final recitation of the Lord’s prayer before his soul departed to meet its maker. The paternoster declaiming body was buried at the church of the Augustin Friars, near Old Broad Street. 

The Earl’s son Thomas was just 16 at the time of his father’s execution but Richard II stripped the boy of the lands and titles he should have inherited from his father. He was placed under the supervision of the King’s half-brother John Holland, the Duke of Exeter. Thomas chafed under the close confinement and humiliating treatment meted out to him by Holland, particularly resenting being given the job of removing and cleaning Exeter’s soiled boots. At the first opportunity he fled into French exile where his older cousin took to join forces with Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and Richard II’s estranged cousin. The 18-year-old Thomas accompanied Bolingbroke back to England in 1399 when the King was taking part in a military campaign in Ireland. Bolingbroke’s armed uprising against the crown soon gathered sufficient momentum to persuade Richard, from his refuge in Conway Castle, to abdicate in return for assurances that he would not be executed. Bolingbroke was crowned King Henry IV in October 1399, but Richard died, almost certainly deliberately starved to death, in Pontefract Caste just four months later. Thomas was rewarded with the return of the family lands and titles and became the 5th Earl of Arundel after acting as King Henry’s butler at his coronation. He served his king loyally, helping to put down rebellions in the Welsh Marches and in the North, and eventually becoming one his most trusted advisors. When the King’s sister, Phillipa of Lancaster, was married to Dom João I of Portugal to help cement an Anglo-Portuguese alliance, Thomas Fitzalan was reciprocally married to the Portuguese king’s illegitimate daughter, Beatrice de Avis de Coimbra. It was Beatrice who commissioned the magnificent tomb for her husband that stands in the Chapel; Thomas had contracted dysentery at the siege of Harfleur in 1415, fighting for Henry V.  The severity of the infection forced him to return home, where he died on his 34th birthday, the 13th October.  A miserable bacterium took from him the opportunity of becoming one of the happy few, the band of brothers, that fought in the glorious victory of the battle of Agincourt, which took place just 12 days after his death. The Earl’s tomb occupies the most prominent position in the chapel, immediately in front of the high altar. Alabaster figures of Thomas and Beatrice, carved by the royal workshops, stand on a chest tomb on which are carved twenty-eight figures. The original iron hearse still survives and surrounds the tomb, but now serves as a candle holder.  In the castle, hanging in a winding corridor that leads to the guest bedrooms, is a water colour of the Chapel showing what I assume is an antiquary, sitting cross legged by the 5th Earl’s tomb consulting a manuscript spread open across his knees. There was no artist information or date but I was very taken with the humble picture that had been relegated to hang with prints and watercolours of flowers and birds in a part of the castle presumably rarely visited by the family. I tried to take a photograph, but the picture is behind glass and my shot shows as much of me and my fellow visitors shuffling along the narrow corridor as it does of the original painting.    

The 5th Earl had no legitimate offspring and so his titles passed to a cousin, John Fitzalan. The 5th Earl’s sisters conformed themselves to the loss of the title (which was entailed to male heirs) and Arundel castle but vigorously disputed that the deceased Earl’s other land holdings should pass to his heir.  Like every other red-blooded male in the kingdom the 6th Earl spent his life fighting the French and the Scots though he was often distracted by the continual legal skirmishing imposed on him by his battling female cousins. The dispute was only settled 12 years after the 6th Earl’s death, when the 7th Earl was finally confirmed as the sole and unconditional heir. It is the 7th Earl who is commemorated in the splendid cadaver tomb that I was so keen to see. No one seems to be exactly sure how many cadaver, or transi, tombs survive in England. Some experts say 33, others 43 or 44. All agree that most transi tombs show isolated sculpted cadavers; there are only about 10 in the country which, like the Arundel tomb, have two effigies, with the living shown above the dead in a double decker arrangement. Like his father and his great uncle, John Fitzalan, the 7th Earl spent the majority of his short adulthood in France, enthusiastically dedicating himself to the continuation of the 100 Years War and earning himself the sobriquet of ‘the English Achilles’ in the process.  On 1st June 1435 he led his men against a superior French force at Gerboray; during the engagement his leg was shattered by a shot from a culverin. Unable to flee the battlefield he was taken prisoner by the French and despite being heavily wounded refused to let himself be treated. As his condition deteriorated a French surgeon amputated his right let despite the Earl’s protests, but it did no good and he died on the 12th June. The French chronicler Jehan de Waurin maintained that the Earl had been buried in the church of the Gray Friars at Beauvais and for this reason the cadaver tomb in the chapel was believed to be a cenotaph, until it was opened in the late 1850’s by the Duke of Norfolk’s chaplin.

In June 1860 the Rev. Canon Tierney, the Chaplin of the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel, wrote a letter to the secretary of the Sussex Archaeological Society, William Durrant Cooper. Cooper was a lawyer and noted antiquary, a native of Lewes who lived at Guildford Street in Russell Square at that time and was the solicitor of the Reform Cub and the Vestry of St Pancras. The Canon’s letter was published in Volume 12 of the society’s journal, the Sussex Archaeological Collections. ‘Mr Dear Sir,’ wrote Tierney ‘I have long wished to send to the Society an account of the opening of the tomb (hitherto regarded only as a cenotaph), and of the consequent discovery of the remains, of one of the most illustrious among the Earls of Arundel, and most renowned among the warriors of the fifteenth century.’  Tierney had been contacted by the Rev. R. W. Eyton, the vicar of Ryton in Shropshire and the author of the 12 volumes of The Antiquities of Shropshire. Eyton had been researching a Shropshire ancestor, Fulke Eyton, who was born around 1440 and seems to have been in the service of John Fitzalan, the 7th Earl of Arundel, in some capacity. On the 8th February 1451 in the castle of Shrawardine in Shropshire (the castle belonged to the Fitzalans) Fulke Eyton wrote out his last will and testament. 400 years later his descendant, the Rev. Ayton, consulted a copy of the will held in the Prerogative Court at Canterbury and was struck by the following passage:

Also I woll that my Lord of Arundell, that now is, aggre and compoune with you, my seide Executours, for the bones of my Lord John his brother, that I brougte oute of France; for the which cariage of bone, and oute of the frenchemenns handes delyveraunce, he owith me a ml. marc and iiii c. and aftere myn Executours byn compouned with, I will that the bones ben buried in the Collage of Arundell, after his intent; and so I to be praide fore, in the Collage of Arundell and Almeshouse, perpetually.

The only illustration from Tierney's letter to William Durrant Cooper, showing the excvation of the tomb

Fulke’s ‘my Lord John’ is the 7th Earl and Fulke is claiming to have brought out of France the Earl’s corpse, his bones, which still seem to be in his possession. For this signal service to the Fitzalans Fulke says he is owed 1400 marks and once the executors of the will have been ‘compounded’ with, he wills that the Earl’s bones be buried in the College, the Chapel at Arundel, according to the Earl’s wish. No one knew is Fulke’s executors had received the 1400 marks or if they had handed over the body of the late Earl. The Rev. Eyton contacted Tierney as Chaplin of the Duke of Norfolk and Tierney did what any sensible person would do to settle the question – he dug the 7th Earl up to see if he was really there;

It was evident that only an examination of the spot could answer these questions; and accordingly, I resolved at once to solicit permission from the Duke of Norfolk for that purpose. The permission was readily granted; but delays, arising from various causes, occurred in the execution of the design; and thus, it was not until Monday, the 16th of November, 1857, that we could enter on the work. On that day, the Duke, accompanied by some of the junior members of his family, and several friends who were visiting at the castle, proceeded to the chapel. I own that my hopes of success were not very sanguine.  The tomb stands in an opening, formed for its reception, in the wall between the two chapels,- the principal Collegiate Chapel on the south, and the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin on the north. Its sides, divided into arches, are open; and, as it was supposed to stand on the solid foundation of the wall which had been cut away for its admission, the only place (so it seemed) in which the body could have been deposited, would be some small vault, close to the foundation wall, either on the north, or on the south side.

After digging on the south side of the monument to a depth of about 3 feet Tierney says it became evident that there was nothing to be discovered. He was about to order the workmen to fill in the hole again when it occurred to him to sound what he assumed to be the foundations of the wall that had been removed when the monument was placed within the arch. At the second stroke of the pickaxe the seemingly solid wall gave way to reveal a chamber within which ‘lay the remains of which we were in search. As, with the single exception of a small portion of one of its sides, the coffin, which had inclosed them, was entirely decayed and gone, the bones were at once exposed to view. They were perfectly sound, and evidently those of a man more than six feet in height. The larger and longer ones had retained their places tolerably well; but the skull, no doubt in the process of removal to England, had been shaken from its socket, and had rolled back to some distance from the rest. Not the least interesting feature in our discovery, however, was the evidence presented to us of the identity of the remains. The Earl's death, as you will recollect, was the result of his wound. The limb had been shattered; and there can be no doubt that amputation would be resorted to. Now, among the remains, only the bone of one leg could be found.’ Completely satisfied that this one legged skeleton were the mortal remains of John Fitzalan, Tierney had them replaced in their sepulchre before sealing up the burial chamber, filling up the hole with the removed earth and replacing the flagstones. 

In the 1870’s the catholic 14th Duke of Norfolk found himself in a dispute with the Anglican vicar of Arundel over who owned the Fitzalan Chapel. The vicar, supported by the Bishop of Chichester was convinced that the Duke had no title to the chapel which was part of the fabric of the parish church.  Following the dissolution of the Chantries in 1547 Edward VI had sold the Chantry of Arundel, which included the chapel, to the 12th Duke of Arundel, making the chancel of the church the private property of the Howards. During the civil war Commonwealth soldiers were barracked in the chancel, causing great damage. The family paid little subsequent attention to the chapel and it fell into a ruinous state of neglect. The vicar launched an action in the courts and the Duke responded initially by building a wall between the chancel and the rest of the church and then by restoring the chapel. The action rumbled on for several years until in 1879 Judge Coleridge, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, finally decided in favour of the Duke. One newspaper, The Brief noted that “it may be an anomaly that a Roman Catholic Chapel should obtrude in a Protestant place of worship, but in this case litigation has done no good.” The Times had no sympathy for the Vicar of Arundel; “In ordinary circumstances the difficulty would not have arisen. Had the Howards accepted the Reformation, they would doubtless have settled very peremptorily the question of the nature of the property held in the Fitzalan Chapel by the college they dispossessed. As the townsmen and successive vicars of Arundel have for the past three hundred and fifty years gone on very comfortably without insisting that their great rector and landlord should show the title under which he buries his dead next door to their church, they must not anticipate much compassion now that it is judicially pronounced that he has been burying them under his own roof and not under theirs.”

An unexpected outcome of the dispute was the 14th Duke became the first for a hundred years to decide to be buried in the chapel along with his wife Augusta in a wonderful example of a high Victorian mausoleum containing white marble effigies by the sculptor Matthew Noble. Noble is responsible for many church monuments and funerary memorials and examples of his work can be found in York Minster, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. He was also responsible for the now lost bust of Thomas Hood which stood on Hood’s grave in Kensal Green. The two figures stand on identical stone Gothic revival tomb chests of Purbeck Marble designed by M. E. Hadfield, a prominent Catholic architect. Despite the renovations carried out in the chapel the Brighton Herald reporting on the burial of the Duke’s wife aid that “the dust and dirt and silence of the bat-haunted Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel, the burial place of the Howards, were disturbed on Wednesday, when the remains of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk (Augusta Mary Minna Catherine) mother of the present Duke, were placed to rest among the long line of ancestors who lie there.”

The 15th Duke is also buried beneath a tomb chest of Purbeck marble with a brass effigy. I have no details of the artist unfortunately. The Dundee Courier of Friday 16 February 1917 gives an interesting account of the Dukes funeral;

FUNERAL OF THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. AN IMPRESSIVE SERVICE. The funeral of the Duke of Norfolk took place yesterday at Arundel. Overnight the casket containing the body had been conveyed in a waggon lined with moss and flowers and drawn by horses to the chapel in the castle, where Canon MacCall conducted a brief choral service, which was attended only by the Duchess, her relatives, and immediate family friends. At 9.30 yesterday morning the remains were conveyed from the castle to St Philip Neri Church. The gathering for the procession to the church was large and of a most representative character. The road from the castle gates was lined on either side by some 400 members of the Sussex Volunteer Regiment selected from the nine battalions, the late Duke having been Honorary Colonel of the regiment, and in the progress of which from the commencement of the war he took the keenest interest. Requiem Mass was celebrated at the church at eleven o'clock. In the procession the Boy Scouts carried the colours presented to them by the Duke just before the war. They were tied with black bows, and the boys wore crepe round their hats. Preceding the waggon bearing the coffin, was carried the Duke's coronet, and immediately behind followed his Grace's charger, with the white and gold cloth used in State processions. The young Duke walked with Lord Edmund Talbot. Then followed many tenants and employees, and boys wearing black sashes and girl’s, who wore crepe veils, from the Roman Catholic schools founded by his Grace. Bringing up the rear was the Bishop of Southwark and other clergy. The sight of the solemn procession deeply affected the many local people lining the pavements. High Mass at St Philip was conducted by the Bishop of Southwark and was deeply impressive. After the service the coffin was borne back the Castle, the remains being deposited in the historic Fitzalan Chapel. The Duchess of Norfolk did not attend High Mass St Philip Neri but was present with her children the private service at Fitzalan Chapel, where the remains were interred. A solemn mass of requiem was celebrated at the Brompton Oratory, London, yesterday, and was attended members of the Royal Family, many members of the Diplomatic Corps, and distinguished relatives and friends of the late Duke. The Prince of Wales was represented by Hon. Sir Sidney Greville, Queen Alexandra by Earl Howe, and the Duke and Duchess of Connaught by Colonel Sir Malcolm Murray. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, attended person.

The entrance to the Fitzalan chapel in the grounds of Arundel Castle

The reopening of the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons

The Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons reopened this week after a 6-year closure for refurbishment. There was a fair old media fanfare to accompany opening day last Tuesday; ‘from syphilitic skulls to human foetuses, London’s creepiest museum reopens after six years’ was the subtle headline in the Evening Standard. The Guardian wasn’t much better; ‘From foetuses to penises: anatomical museum reopens in London’. Apollo Magazine called it ‘London’s most gruesome museum’ and Time Out breathlessly listed ‘Six gross things we can’t wait to see at the reopened Hunterian’. One of the first visitors was 38-year-old Jennifer Sutton who had come specifically to see her own heart. Jennifer had a heart transplant at Papworth Hospital in 2007. Her old heart is preserved in formaldehyde and is on display in the museum.   “I'm glad it's in that jar and I have a new one,” Jennifer told the Daily Mail, “'I am grateful though as it kept me alive for 22 hears, it's like an old friend.”

I went for a flying visit on Thursday lunchtime and the place was packed. It remains to be seen whether this popularity will continue or if the museum will revert to being the rather out of the way place it used to be, when you often had the place virtually to yourself even at weekends. They have done a rather good job of the refurbishment. I liked the old set up but the new museum (now on the ground floor of the Royal College) tells a more coherent story, not just about John Hunter but also about his pupils, the surgeon anatomists who followed in his footsteps like the brilliant artist Charles Bell or the fastest scalpel in the west end, Robert Liston. Some of the display cases are works of art in themselves; my favourite contains a single white bust of John Hunter surrounded by dozens of horned animal skulls and other assorted skeletal remains. Hundreds of Hunter’s specimens are shown in a new crystal gallery, very similar to the old one.  

 I was given a map by a security guard at the entrance but I didn’t look at it, I just shoved it in my pocket. There were signs up saying no flash photography which meant that non-flash photography must be allowed – a change from the old days when all photography was prohibited. There were too many people in to get many general photos so I mainly confined myself to taking pictures of the specimens. Only when I later took out the map did I see the notice printed at the bottom in red letters “Please be aware that the Museum contains human anatomical specimens, including fetuses. Photography of human specimens is not permitted”. I have some good, though rather disquieting, images of the fetuses, many of which are so well developed that they are really almost full-term dead babies, preserved in jars. It is perhaps just as well that I feel I can’t share them. Not everything that was on display in the old museum has made into the new.  It is interesting that the fetuses remain on display alongside the identifiable remains of people who almost certainly did not consent to becoming museum pieces (Jonathan Wild would not want his skeleton exposed to public view) whilst other specimens have been removed. The skeleton of Charles Byrne, the Irish giant, is no longer on public display following a campaign to force the museum to give up his remains for burial.

Byrne, who was 8 feet 4 inches tall, made a living from displaying himself in public but had a horror of the surgeons getting hold of him for dissection after his death. Famously he left instructions in his will to be buried at sea to avoid what he felt would be his inevitable fate at the hands of the resurrectionists if he allowed himself to be buried on land. At an overnight stop on the way to the Kent coast at Margate Byrne was removed from his coffin and dispatched back to John Hunter in London whilst the empty casket was filled with rocks to imitate the weight of the dead man. Whilst the rock filled coffin was being dropped into the sea from a fishing boat Byrne was back on his way to London where Hunter carefully sectioned his corpse before boiling it in a large copper vat to remove the flesh. For over 15 years campaigners have tried to pressurise the Royal College of Surgeons into surrendered Byrne’s bones up for burial. In 2020 they were joined by Dame Hilary Mantel, author of the excellent novel The Giant O’Brien, loosely based on Byrne’s life.  She wrote to the Guardian;

It’s time Charles went home.  I know that in real life he was a suffering soul, nothing like the fabulous storybook giant I created, and that his gratifications were fewer and his end very grim. I think that science has learned all it can from the bones, and the honourable thing now is lay him to rest. It would suit the spirit of the times, and I don’t see a reason for delay. He’s waited long enough. “I assumed the burial at sea was just an attempt to evade Hunter, and that if the bones were recovered from the RCS he would be buried in Ireland. I hope there would be a welcome party for him, and I hope I can come and join it.

Alas Dame Hilary died in September 2022 and didn’t live to hear the news in January this year that the Hunterian Trustees, after considering the ‘sensitivities’ of keeping and displaying Byrnes skeleton, had decided that it would no longer be on public view when the museum reopened. It is only a partial success for the campaigners as the museum will retain the skeleton but only make it available for "bona fide medical research" into gigantism. The Irish Giant isn’t the only person to be taken off display. I did not see any sign of the Sicilianfairy, Caroline Crachami, a primordial dwarf whose remains also came into the possession of the Hunterian in a dubious manner. I also couldn’t find the brain of Charles Babbage which used to be on prominent display. My understanding is that Babbage did give permission for his remains to be displayed. Perhaps I should email the Royal College and ask why…

In which of my cities will I die?; Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Le cimetière des Rois, Plainpalais, Geneva

 

En cuál de mis ciudades moriré?

¿En Ginebra, donde recibí la revelación, no de Calvino ciertamente, sino de Virgilio y de Tácito? 

Jorge Luis Borges ‘Qué será del caminante fatigado’

I still know Geneva far better than I know Buenos Aires, which is easily explained by the fact that in Geneva no two street corners are alike, and one quickly learns the differences. Every day, I walked along that green and icy river, the Rhone, which runs through the very heart of the city, spanned by seven quite different-looking bridges. The Swiss are rather proud and standoffish.

J.L. Borges – Autobiographical Notes (1970) 

I don’t often do celebrity graves but when I was in Geneva in January I had make an exception to visit and pay my respects to Jorge Luis Borges the Argentinian writer as I have, with a fascination bordering on obsession, been reading, and re-reading, him now for the best part of 50 years.  A trip to his graveside is also a homage to another literary hero, John Berger, who made the trip in the early 2000's and wrote about it in the wonderful ‘Here Is Where We Meet’. Berger in his later years was a great haunter of cemeteries, and standing at the head of Borges grave, standing in Berger’s footsteps, I remembered a passage in ‘And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos’;

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

In his late story ‘El Otro’ (The Other – first published, of all places, amongst the bums and tits in Playboy) the 70 year old Borges describes an incident which he claims “occurred in February, 1969, in Cambridge, north of Boston”; resting whilst out on a stroll along the banks of the Charles River he meets a young man who he recognises as his younger self, who is sitting on the banks of the Rhone in Geneva. The older Borges concludes that the encounter, for him, is real but that for his younger self, it is only a dream. The city of Geneva was always hugely significant to the Argentinian writer. 

Borges lived in Geneva from 1914 until early 1919. It was where he wrote his first poems and where, in 1917, he almost lost his virginity. His father felt that that the time was right for his studious 18-year-old son to forget his books and learn about corporal pleasures, and so arranged an assignation with a prostitute. Unable to rid himself of the idea that his father had probably already been with the prostitute himself, the occasion was a complete disaster which left Borges with a marked aversion for all matters sexual. Ironic then that Geneva was the city in which Borges married for the second time (though the ceremony took place by proxy in Paraguay) to Maria Kodama. His first marriage, in 1967, when he was 68, was to a widow Elsa Astete Millán and only lasted three years before the couple legally separated. There were no divorce laws in Argentina and so when Borges married for the second time his civil status in his homeland became extremely complicated. Maria Kodama, who was 38 years younger than Borges, had been one of his students in the early 1970’s before becoming his assistant and secretary. The marriage, which took place just weeks before he died on 14 June 1986 caused major consternation in Argentina. Press speculation as to Kodama’s motives was so fevered and the newlyweds were so harassed by journalists that Borges wrote a letter to the EFE news agency protested at media intrusion and pleading to be left in peace “I feel strangely happy in Geneva,” he wrote, “this has nothing to do with the culture of my ancestors and the basic love of country. It seems strange, that someone doesn’t understand and respect this decision by a man who, like one of Wells’ characters, has determined to be an invisible man…” The death of the writer did not put an end to lurid press speculation; reports in the papers suggested that he might have killed himself. There were also rumours about millions of pesos and dollars stashed away in Swiss back accounts; reporters took to following Maria Kodama whenever she left her hotel hoping to see her visit the bank and withdraw large sums in cash.

Borges was buried on Wednesday 18 June 1986 under a yew tree in the Cimetière des Rois in Planpalais. Over 500 mourners crowded the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, overlooking the old city.  The funeral service was jointly conducted by a Catholic priest and a Protestant pastor because his lineage included ancestors from both sides of the post-reformation schism.  The funeral cortege then carried him the short distance down the hill to the Plainpalais cemetery, originally a graveyard for plague victims but now the elite final resting place for Swiss worthies. Maria Kodama selected the burial spot beneath the yew and a stones throw away from the grave of John Calvin, who was buried there in 1564. “It is a great honor to be buried there,” said city council spokesman Robert Vieux, to the UPI press agency “particularly for foreigners. In giving its approval, the town council recognized Borges great talent and his lifelong love of Geneva.”  At the same time as the funeral the city hospital took the unusual step of making an official announcement that the writer had died of liver cancer.  The hospital spokesman explained that they had taken this step at the request of the family because of the wild rumours being promulgated by the press in Latin America; 'the death of Borges caused considerable emotion in Argentina as well as in Europe and his great fame unfortunately provoked speculation about his illness and the cause of death,' the medical statement said. 'It was necessary to put an end to certain allegations.'  

Borges tombstone was made by the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Longato. Maria Kodama later said that she was not sure who had come up with the design and that it was probably mostly Longato’s work but the words and motif’s were so charged with meaning for Borges that it is difficult to believe that he did not either leave instructions for the stone mason or discuss it with him directly.   The memorial is in the shape of a runestone and contains inscriptions and designs on both faces. The front has Borges name inscribed above a design of seven Viking warriors brandishing weapons clearly based on the 9th-century grave marker found at Lindisfarne, known as the Viking Domesday stone. Below this are the words ‘And ne forhtedon na’, then below that, obscured by a shrub, the dates 1899 1986 and a small Celtic cross. The inscription is in Old English and means ‘Be not afraid.’ It is a quote from the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ which celebrated the doomed defence of the Essex coast by a group of Anglo-Saxon warriors against a Viking raid in 991. Borges translated the poem and the significance of the words when placed on a tomb are obvious.  

The obverse side of the stone depicts a Viking ship, the design based on various ships shown on Runestones from Gotland in Sweden.  A line from the Old Norse Volsunga Saga is inscribed above the ship, ‘Hann tekr sverðit Gram ok leggr i meðal þeira bert’, which translated means; he took the sword Gram and laid the naked metal between them. In the saga the hero Sigurd rides his horse through the flames that surround the sleeping Brynhild who has been cursed by Odin only to marry a man who is not afraid to rescue her from her flaming prison. Sigurd cuts off her coat of chain mail and wakes her. The couple fall in love but as Sigurd is already married and is only rescuing Brynhild so that she can wed another man, they spend three nights together but with Sigurd's naked, dragon slaying sword between them to prevent consummation of their passion. Presumably this is a reference to the unconsummated love between Jorge and Maria, no sword being necessary in the face of age, infirmity, terminal cancer and a lifelong aversion to sex. To underline the point the words ‘De Ulrica a Javier Otárola’ are inscribed below the ship.  Ulrica and Javier are characters in the story ‘Ulrikke’ from The Book of Sand which also used the translated quote from the Volsunga saga as an epigraph.   

Borges with Maria Kodama

In 2009 a Peronist politician, Maria Beatriz Lenz, proposed to the Argentine Congress that Borges remains should be repatriated and buried in the family vault at the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. The proposal was backed by the Borges biographer who also happened to be the then head of the Argentine Society of Writers, Alexander Vaccaro. The plan was to get his corpse back to Argentina in time for the 110th anniversary of Borges birth on the 24th August. The plan came to naught as Maria Kodama wanted nothing to do with it; “In a democracy, no one, no party, can take a person’s body, that is the most sacred thing,” she was reported as saying. Borges hit the news again in 2011 when a Chilean writer released a book whose cover showed him pissing on Borges tomb. Here is the story as reported in the Guardian;

Jorge Luis Borges was possibly the greatest Spanish-language writer of the 20th century, but the Chilean author Eduardo Labarca felt the best tribute a fellow writer could pay would be to urinate on his tomb. A photograph on the cover of 72-year-old Labarca's latest book appears to show him doing exactly that in the Geneva graveyard where Borges's well-tended, flower-adorned tomb lies. The photo has provoked outrage in Borges's native Argentina, even though Labarca admits the stream of water descending on the great man's grave actually came from a bottle of water hidden in his right hand. "This is in bad taste and is a violation," said the Argentine culture minister, Jorge Coscia. "You don't gain anything by urinating on a tomb." Labarca was unapologetic today about the cover to his book The Enigma of the Modules, saying it could best be understood by reading the work itself. "Peeing on that tomb was a legitimate artistic act," he told the Guardian. "The cover of the book is coherent with the contents and is best understood through that."

Labarca is a translator, writer and journalist who went into exile and worked for a Soviet radio station after the coup d'état that overthrew Salvador Allende and brought in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. He went on to work as a translator for various United Nations organisations and currently splits his time between Vienna and Chile. "I am not just a person who goes around peeing on tombs, but a writer with a serious oeuvre," he said today. Labarca told Argentina's perfil.com that Borges's talent as a writer had not been matched by his behaviour outside literature. "Anyone who is offended by this is very short-sighted," he said. "Borges was a giant as a writer but I feel complete contempt for him as a citizen. As an old man, almost blind, he came to meet the dictator Pinochet in the days when he was busy killing." Borges was delighted with Pinochet. "He is an excellent person," he said afterwards. "The fact is that here, and in my country and in Uruguay, liberty and order are being saved."

"so frightful an object..." the monument of Princess Sophia (1777-1848), Kensal Green Cemetery

Royal patronage helped boost the popularity of the new cemetery at Kensal Green. It had been opened for just over 10 years when the sixth son of George III, Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex, was buried here in 1843. Put off a state funeral by the rather undignified ceremonials at the interments of his older brothers, George IV and William IV, the Duke of Sussex opted for a more low-key affair with burial in a public cemetery rather than in the Royal Chapel. When his sister Princess Sophia died five years later, she left instructions that she wished to be buried near her brother. And so they lie, almost side by side, in central plots on either side of the main pathway, in front of the Anglican Chapel. Princess Sophia’s memorial is the more visually striking. It is a not entirely successful mash-up; an ornate Italianate quattrocento sarcophagus with lions’ feet and winged lion heads marooned on top of a huge plain slab of Carrera marble which is in turn balanced precariously on a granite plinth. It may look as though it was designed by a nine-year-old but the man responsible for this ‘frightful object’ was Professor Ludwig Grüner of Dresden, Prince Albert’s artistic adviser who was responsible for the design of the royal mausoleums at Frogmore. According to The Truth of 07 May 1891, Queen Victoria was not amused by the monument placed over her aunt’s final resting place;

Prince Albert was one of the most cultivated men of the present century, and his taste, both in literature and art was superlatively good, but he was two or three times guilty of astonishing aberrations in art matters. The Sudbury window is one of these mistakes, and the frightful monument to Princess Sophia in Kensal Green Cemetery is another. There is a good story about this same monument. A few years ago the Queen took it into her head to visit the cemetery, in order that she might inspect the tombs of the Duke of Sussex and Princess Sophia; and after her Majesty had seen the monument to her aunt, she expressed very keen indignation that so frightful an object should have been placed over the grave of any member of the Royal family, declared that it had never been authorised, and ordered that the archives of the Household should be searched in order that it might be discovered what official had presumed to act in such a matter on his own responsibility. A few days after, down came the original sketch of the monument, when it was discovered that it bore the talismanic words, "Approved—Albert."

The princess at the age of 20

Princess Sophia was born in 1777, the 12th child (5th daughter) of that most fecund of Royal couples, George III and Queen Charlotte, who had, in case you had forgotten, 15 children in total. The later Hanoverians were a notoriously lusty lot, but George III and Queen Charlotte at least kept their amorousness strictly within the bounds of marriage, unlike their offspring. King George was very protective of his daughters and preferred them to his sons. Although he was always an affectionate father and, very unusually for the time, took a keen interest in the education and development of his girls they were brought up very strictly and kept away from the world as much as possible. Charlotte, the Princess Royal was the only daughter to marry early; the rest of the princesses had their share of suitors, but their mother was reluctant to let them marry; she felt questions of marriage adversely affected her husband’s precarious mental health and she was keen to keep them around as her own companions. Frustrated, the princesses sought outlets for their amorous instincts with wildly unsuitable courtiers, often of inferior rank. Sophia was rumoured to have fallen in love with her father’s equerry Major-General Thomas Garth who was not only 33 years her senior but had a large purple birth mark on his wrinkled visage.  There were also rumours of an incestuous relationship with her brother Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland.  Arrogant, irascible, deeply conservative, anti-Catholic (he was a master of the Orange Lodges) an inveterate womaniser and sex pest the Duke was so keenly disliked that any rumour about him found an audience willing to believe it. When Princess Sophia was rumoured to have had an illegitimate child in 1800, many thought Thomas Garth had to be the father though others pointed the finger at her own brother. Thomas Garth brought up this child and almost 30 years later, when he thought he was on his deathbed, is supposed to have confessed the secret of his parentage to him. Young Tommy immediately set about trying to blackmail the Royal family for the huge sum of £30,000. The ex-MP for Appleby Thomas Creevy wrote to his stepdaughter Elizabeth Ord on 14 February 1829 that “there is nothing going forward except this reported visit of the Duke of Cumberland. Are you aware that Captain Garth is the son of this Duke by Princess Sophia. General Garth, at the suit of the old King, consented to pass for the father of this son. The latter, in every way worthy of his villainous father, has shown all the letters upon this occasion, including one of the King’s. The poor woman has always said that this business would be her death. Garth asks £30,000 for the letters, and, to enhance their value, shews the worst part of them.”  Tommy Garth was never paid but continued his ‘bullying importunities’ for the rest of her life.

A satirical print of 1830 showing the much despised Duke of Cumberland as a satyr guarding a secured box entitled 'Garth Papers'

In later life Princess Sophia lived in Kensington Palace, her rooms adjoined those of her niece, Princess Victoria of Kent, the future Queen Victoria. The household was run by the Comptroller Sir John Conroy, a man detested by Victoria. Sophia on the other hand adored him, let him manage her money (which he shamelessly stole) and probably spied on the future Queen for him. Unsurprisingly Victoria was not fond of her aunt. When Sophia died in 1848 the Queen did not attend the funeral, sending Albert in her stead. The funeral was held at an unusually early hour, the procession left Kensington Palace at 5.30 in the morning and was over by 7.00am. Her body was initially laid in the catacombs beneath the Anglican Chapel until her vault and monument in the cemetery were ready for her. The North Wales Chronicle of Tuesday 13 June 1848 gives a good account of her rather melancholy obsequies;

FUNERAL OF THE PRINCESS SOPHIA. The mortal remains of her late Royal Highness the Princess Sophia were on Tuesday morning, at an early hour, consigned to their last resting-place in one of the vaults of the catacombs of Kensall-green Cemetery, situated near the vault which contains the ashes of her Royal brother, the late Duke of Sussex. The funeral cortege, agreeably to the expressed wishes of the illustrious deceased, was as private as possible - There was no pomp, no pride; the hearse containing the body did not display any armorial bearings, neither was there an escutcheon on the velvet covering of the hearse. The mournful procession left Kensington Palace at the early hour of five o'clock, and was composed of the hearse, drawn by six horses; nine mourning coaches, each drawn by four horses, containing the medical attendants and domestics of the late princess, preceded the hearse, and it was followed by one mourning coach only, in which were his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge, chief mourner, his Royal Highness Prince Albert, and his Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge. The procession arrived at the entrance to the cemetery about a quarter before seven o’clock and was there met by several clergymen who were in attendance, after which it moved slowly on to the chapel, where the Duke of Wellington, the Lord Chamberlain, Lord John Russell, and several of the Cabinet ministers, had previously arrived to attend the mournful ceremony. The body having been conveyed into the chapel, the impressive and solemn burial service of the Church was read by the Bishop of Norwich ; after which the coffin, which is made of Spanish mahogany, covered over with crimson silk velvet, and elaborately ornamented with silver gilt nails and massive gilt handles, and which bears the following simple inscription on the plate- "Her Royal Highness Princess Sophia, born Nov. 3, 1777, died May 27, 1848, aged 71 years," was lowered into the vault. The whole ceremony was over by half-past seven o'clock. There was no attendance of military, and only a few policemen to clear the line of road, should there be any obstruction, but their services were not required. We understand that orders have been given for the erection of a splendid vault for members of the Royal family who may hereafter express a wish for their remains to be interred at Kensal-green Cemetery. The great bell of Westminster t Abbey tolled at intervals during the morning, and the theatres were all closed in the evening. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the different Royal carriages, which, however, did not follow in the procession to the cemetery, were occupied by the illustrious owners, and drove off at a quick rate on their return to town.