Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/457

 ii s. vm. DEC. 6, 1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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confidence that she was a Roman Catholic, and he thus writes of her death

"in a foreign land, surrounded by strangers, and so oppressed by poverty that her remains were nearly consigned to a spot of ground appro- priated to the lowest description of the poor, for the want of means to defray the expenses of a decent funeral ; when an English merchant at Calais, shocked at the circumstance, undertook the charge ; and all the respectable gentlemen of Ihis nation, amounting to about fifty, attended as mourners at the interment, which was duly performed in the principal cemetery of that place. The same generous person, who so humanely provided a decent sepulture for the dead, ex- tended his protecting hand to the child that she had left [who was then 14], and who was now in danger of suffering from her mother's folly and extravagance," &c.

There was a third edition of this book published in 1835, which I have not been able to see.

In The Gentleman's Magazine, 1815, vol. Ixxxv. part i. p. 183, there is yet another account :

" In the village near Calais where she died there was no Protestant clergyman ; and no Catholic priest would officiate, because she was A heretic ; she was even refused Christian burial ; no coffin was allowed, but the body was put in a sack, and cast in a hole. An English gentleman, hearing of this barbarity, had the body dug up, put in a coffin, and interred, though not in the churchyard."

In 1905 Mr. Walter Sichel, in 'Emma, Lady Hamilton ' an excellent work gives, I believe, the best account of this matter in chap, xvi, ' From Debt to Death,' p. 464. He says of this extraordinary woman and her daughter Horatia :

" They were not in absolute want, but, had Iheir suspense been protracted, they must ere long have been so."

As to the funeral, he says that " Mrs. Hunter's account of the funeral, however, is an ascertained myth." As to her death he says :

" The priest is fetched in haste. She still has strength to be absolved, to receive extreme unction from a stranger's hands. Weeping Horatia and old ' Dame Francis ' re-enter as, in that awful moment, shrived, let us hope, and reconciled, she clings, and rests in their embrace. It had been her wish to lie beside her mother in the Paddington church. This, too, was thwarted. On the next Friday she was buried. The hearse was followed by the many naval officers then at Calais to the cheerless cemetery, before many years converted into a timber-yard. Had she died a Protestant such was the revival of Catholicism in France intolerance would have refused a service ; only a few months earlier, a blameless and charming actress had been pitched at Paris into an unconsecrated grave. It was these circumstances that engendered the fables, soon circulated in England, of Emma's burial in a deal box covered by a tattered petticoat."

Mr. Sichel goes on to say :

" The site of her grave has vanished, and with it the two poor monuments rumoured to have marked the spot ; the first (if Mrs. Hunter be here believed) of wood, ' like a battledore handle downwards ' ; the second a headstone, which a ' Guide to Calais ' mentions in 1833. Its Latin inscription was then partially decipherable : .... Quae .... Calesiae Via in Gallica vocata Et in domo C. vi. obiit die xv Mensis Januarii A.D. MDC.C.CXV.

JEtatis suae LI., i.e., in the fifty-first year of her age.

" This headstone probably replaced the wooden one. It was perhaps erected by some officers of that navy which, long after she had gone, always remembered her unflagging zeal, and kind- ness with gratitude."

The extract from R. B. Calton's book refers to " Amy Lyons," but she signed the marriage register on 6 Sept., 1791, when she was married to Sir William Hamilton in Marylebone Church, " Amy Lyon," with- out a final s, though in the published an- nouncements of the marriage she was spoken of as "Miss Harte." See ' D.N.B.,' vol. xxiv. p. 149, second column. " Lyon " appears to be the correct way of spelling her name. See the copy of the register of her baptism set out in The Edinburgh Review before mentioned, p. 383.

Lady Hamilton, as before stated, died in January, 1815, and the Calais newspapers, and the ' Guide to Calais,' if any, of that date may possibly contain an account of her funeral. A map of Calais of 1815 ought to show the cemetery, and a map of the present day would show the timber-yard.

One would like to know when and in what circumstances this Roman Catholic cemetery was converted into a timber-yard, and whether the bodies and tombstones were first removed to some other burial-ground.

HARRY B. POLAND. Inner Temple.

LADY FRANCES ERSKINE : ISSUE (11 S. viii. 390). Frances Gardiner married Sir William Baird of Saughtonhall, in the county of Edinburgh, St., Capt. R.N., and had one son, Sir James Gardiner Baird of Saughtonhall, Bt.

Richmond Gardiner the " Fanny fair " of the song ' 'Twas at the Hour of Dark Midnight,' written in commemoration of her father by Sir Gilbert Elliot, third Baronet of Minto married Laurence Inglis, one of the Clerks to the Bills, and had two sons, Henry David Inglis, advocate, and William