Inheritance by Leo Hollis

Author:Leo Hollis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786079954
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

6

‘A Woman of Great Estate’

GRIEF IS OVERPOWERING, and in the months following Sir Thomas’s death Dame Mary’s life must be read through this gauze of loss. Daughter, heiress, wife, and now – at the age of thirty-five – widow, Dame Mary was for the first time in her life in charge of her inheritance. And as a result, she was never more vulnerable and alone. She was, for once, in control of her destiny and, at the same time, at her most incapable of commanding it.

One day in July 1700, Sir Thomas’s body was taken to St Mary’s Church in Eccleston, and buried in the family vault. Today, the family graves are located beside the old wall of the fourteenth-century church, which was replaced in the nineteenth century and has been allowed to fall into a neatly curated ruin. Sir Thomas was laid to rest alongside his grandfather, the second Baronet, and was later joined by his three sons. In the coming centuries, these ancestors have been joined by later generations of Grosvenors up to the present day. Today, one can read the history of the family through the gravestones, like an ancestral conference.

The funeral itself was intended to manage the relationship between the social ritual surrounding the departure of a potent and wealthy man and an offering of religious comforts to those who mourned him. Sir Thomas was forty-five years old. Life expectancy in that era for a male was thirty-five, but that was because of the dangers faced at birth and in infancy. If an aristocratic man could make it to twenty-one, he was expected to live to at least sixty-four years old.1 Sir Thomas’s departure was therefore a shock to all, even those who had witnessed his recent fever. His decline had been rapid. While he had been able to sort out many of his affairs in his last weeks, there were still to be disruptions and disputes about the future of the estate.

The bells of St Mary’s may have rung during Sir Thomas’s last days and then again on the day of his funeral; as a mark of respect to the dead, to alert the community to the ceremony, a call to prayer, and a consolation to the grieving. The body was prepared soon after the death. It was washed and dressed. Some aristocratic bodies were embalmed to preserve them for longer. Most likely the body remained at Eaton Hall until the day of the funeral, which was soon after the death. It was common that someone – a family member, a servant, a group of mourners – sat up with the body. It was laid out in a public room and according to Francis Tate, ‘covered in a sheet, and candles burning night and day’.2 John Aubrey notes that such ‘watching’ could be accompanied by beer, tobacco and gossip, but this was increasingly looked down upon by polite society. In addition, Dame Mary was heavily pregnant and was unlikely to have been able to perform her widow’s duties.

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