THE DEAD HAND
“With this thread from out the tomb my dead hand
shall tether thee!”
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
John Oliver Hobbes, in “The Dream and the Business,” makes Firmalden’s
uncle leave to him £5,000 a year, on condition that he should become
and remain a Congregational minister. “My uncle meant well by his
will,” Firmalden said, “but I must have my independence. That money
binds me hand and foot. I have no rage against wealth as wealth. I like
it. But I must either earn it or inherit it unconditionally.”
In “Maid’s Money” Mrs. Dudeney makes “old Aunt Eliza” leave to Amy and
Sarah, cousins, her wealth and her house in Cornwall on the condition
that they always live there together and unmarried. “Listen!” says
Diana to David in Mrs. Barclay’s “The Following of the Star.” “There
was a codicil to Uncle Falcon’s will—a private codicil known only to
Mr. Inglestry and myself, and only to be made known a year after his
death, to those whom, if I failed to fulfil its conditions, it might
then concern. Riverscourt, and all this wealth, are mine, only on
condition that I am married within twelve months of Uncle Falcon’s
death. He has been dead eleven.”
Mrs. Craigie’s, Mrs. Dudeney’s, and Mrs. Barclay’s imaginary wills
are no less binding and coercive than many real wills seek to be.
Conditional legacies are indeed become a byword, and are often of a
difficult, not to say preposterous, nature.
G. K. Chesterton in “Orthodoxy” has a fanciful but suggestive passage,
in which he conceives of life itself as so strange a legacy that man
must not gape or wonder if the conditions too are strange. “If I leave
a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he
cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity
of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth.” Legally,
it may be of interest to note in passing, a devise of property on an
impossible condition will not take effect. If a man is to inherit lands
on condition that he goes from Britain to Rome in an hour, he will not
(until flying-machines are more perfect) ever succeed to the lands.
Such provisions are stock material in the drama, from Shakespeare to
“The New Sin.” “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will
of a dead father,” sighs Portia in “The Merchant of Venice.” Lesser
comedy and melodrama are much indebted to conditional wills. To take
two recent examples: In “The Pin and the Pudding” the rich uncle of the
poor hero Malkin leaves him his riches—on condition that he has never
been in prison: whereby hangs the tale. In “The Beggar Girl’s Wedding”
Jack Cunningham only inherits his father’s fortune if he is married by
the time he is twenty-five: whence a thrilling plot develops.
But to study real life. A legacy of £20,000 was left recently by a
father to a son if, within ten years of the testator’s death, he should
have returned to the religious faith in which he was brought up. The
difference between the two sects appeared to be slight, but the legacy
was under such conditions intolerable. Another strange distinction or
definition is that of “member of the Anglican Catholic Church,” as
opposed to “member of the Evangelical Protestant Church”: but recently
a testator stipulated that no one should take a benefit who deserved
the former appellation.
More intelligible is the distinction between Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism, and in this respect the dead hand is apt to lay heavy
restrictions on the living. That any legatee becoming a Roman Catholic
or marrying a Roman Catholic shall forfeit all interest is a common
provision: it has even been stipulated that if a daughter’s husband
should become a Roman Catholic she herself should forfeit. More
comprehensive was the will of a testator who cut down the benefit
of any child who should join the Roman Catholic Church, or become
associated with the Peculiar People, Faith Healers, or Christian
Scientists or any similar religious or quasi-religious body, he
“well knowing the harm, trouble and misery caused in homes thereby.”
Comprehensive, too, was the will of a minister who recorded his
“detestation of all state establishments of religion, believing them to
be anti-scriptural and soul-ruining. I have for years prayed the King
of Zion to overthrow the politico-ecclesiastical establishment of the
British Empire, and I leave the world with a full conviction that such
prayer must ere long be answered. I thirst to see the Church brought
down, the Church by man set up, for millions are by it led on to drink
a bitter cup.... Heaven dash all error sin and the devil from the
earth, and cause truth holiness and Christ everywhere to prevail.”
It is strange that any should think it a moral act to strive to bind
and bribe the consciences of their children or heirs. It is pleasant
to turn to the story of Henry More’s inheritance, where tolerance was
shown in an intolerant age. The Calvinism of his parents could not
appeal to the dreamy, intellectual youth, and they perceived how he was
drifting away from their manners and beliefs. But it is said that his
father seeing him one day among his books at Cambridge—not Calvinistic,
we may be sure—was so taken by his looks and manner that he went away
and set him down for a substantial legacy in his will.
But not only in religion the effort to shape destinies is shown.
Legacies are made conditional, for instance, on the recipient
remaining single, on not marrying a person named, or one not approved
by the testator’s wife and sister-in-law, a first cousin, an Irishman.
An American heiress ten years of age was to forfeit the fortune of her
grandmother if she travelled unaccompanied by a maid or chaperon of
education and refinement, or if she married a divorced man or an actor.
Recently a legacy was left on condition that the donee should marry a
lady in society.
It is not surprising that wills should occur in which distrust or
horror of alcohol is prominent. “My experience,” says one, “acquired
as a large employer of labour and as a Justice of the Peace, and my
observation of what is hourly taking place, have convinced me that
the present facilities for the sale of intoxicating liquors operate
to the prejudice, both morally and materially, of large masses of
the community, and that these facilities ought to be curtailed.” He
therefore directs that his real estate shall be sold only on condition
that the purchaser allows no building to be erected thereon for any
purpose connected with intoxicating liquors. The condition was to last
“for twenty-one years after the decease of the longest lived survivor
of her late Majesty Queen Victoria,” and the term would have been
extended had the law allowed.
A brewer, on the other hand, provided that, should the licence of
any one of forty-four public-houses and twelve off-licence shops
belonging to his company be forfeited between the date of his will and
his death, an equivalent amount should pass to a University instead
of to the town for whose benefit he left his residuary estate. His
reason, he stated, was that if the licence was lost through the conduct
of the frequenters of the house, their action would cost the town a
considerable sum, while if it were lost through the action of teetotal
magistrates the town would be punished. A total abstainer, he declared,
had no more right to compel a temperate man to abstain from drinking
his particular beverage than the temperate man had a right to compel
the total abstainer by force of law to drink it. But he hoped the first
contingency would make the inhabitants careful of their conduct.
Curious glimpses of life in olden days are given in conditions which
now and then are enjoined. Edmund Clifton (1547) gave to Sir Geruys
Clifton, knight, “the standing cup of silver and gilt and a goblet
parcel gilt, which he hath already in his custody, upon condition that
he help and assist my wife, and do not enforce her nor be about her
to take any husband but such as she shall willingly be pleased and
contented with, nor be about to do her any other displeasure, neither
by word nor deed; and if he do anything contrary to this condition,
then this bequest to be void.” He also gave 40s. to Jane Mering “of
this condition, that she shall profess and knowledge herself not to
have done her duty to me and my wife, before Mr. Parson and four or
five of the honester men in the parish.” He seems to have had the
spark of eccentricity in him, and perhaps Jane Mering was not wholly
in the wrong. Would that we had the sequel of the story!
Other conditions and stipulations might be quoted at length, as that
racehorses should not be kept, moustaches should not be worn, a certain
profession should be followed, a certain house occupied for part of
the year, a certain person precluded from living in the house, or
“that in the event of the death of her husband, she shall not come
to reside within twenty miles of Charing Cross.” Daniel Seton (1803)
leaves his son Andrew as residuary heir “on condition he goes to Europe
on his mother’s death and marries and settles: in failure of him I
give the option to Daniel.” Francis Gybbon (1727) of Bennenden, Kent,
late merchant of Barbados, gives to his “kinsmen Leonard Gybbon and
his brother—Gybbon, the wheelwright, both of Gravesend in Kent, sons
of Arthur Gybbon, all that tract of land called Mount Gybbon upon
the branches of Unknown Creek near Cohansey, in the province of West
Jersey in America, to them and their heirs for ever, provided they go
and settle upon it: if they do not in three years, then to revert to
Francis Gybbon my executor, ... the quantity being 5,600 acres.”
But frequently the testator only states his inmost beliefs and desires,
leaves a prayer or sermon as his solemn admonition when he shall have
passed away. A military man, recently deceased, expressed such beliefs
and desires in his will: “I desire to bring home to the minds of my
sons and of each and every young man who may hereafter take benefit
in my property under this my will, how strongly I hold to the view
that every man should during some substantial portion of his life,
and certainly during his early manhood, have some definite occupation
and lead a useful life, and should not suffer wealth or any accession
of wealth or other temptation to tempt him into idleness and a mere
loafing and useless existence. I might have so framed this my will as
to have made idleness operate to forfeit the interests hereby conferred
on my sons, or other young men, in my property, but I foresee that such
a provision might, in some cases, work hardships, and I prefer to hope
and to trust, as I do, that no son of mine, and no other young man who
may, under this my will, succeed to the enjoyment of any property of
mine, will so disregard my views herein expressed as to lead the life I
so strongly deprecate.”
A Welsh clergyman asked his legatees to remember the motto of Burns,
“An honest man’s the noblest work of God,” and the word of a greater,
“Owe no man anything,” an inspired command which we are bound to obey.
Baron Bertrand de Lassus, lately deceased, who left the residue of his
estate to his brother, closes with a noble exhortation: “I entreat
him to remain faithful to our family traditions in the South, to love
Montrejeau as I have loved it myself, to attach himself to it, to do
there all the good that he will be able to do, and to maintain intact
and without a stain the honour and name of our ancestors, and I urge
him to continue all the charitable work which I am keeping up in our
district, to do it better and more completely if he thinks he can
do so, to love the Pyrenees and our South with the same ardent love
with which I have loved them, and to remain faithful above all to our
old traditions of religion and the honour of our house.” But desire,
however ardent, cannot instil love and worship in another’s soul.
Parents’ solicitude for their children is often touchingly expressed.
The dead hand is raised in blessing and yearning. A Jewish testator
exhorted his son to beware of the vanities and great things of this
world, bearing in mind the saying “_tout passe, tout casse, tout
lasse_,” and in his happiest hours never to forget the poor. Viscount
Lumley, in his will dated the 13th year of Charles II., says: “And out
of the great love and care I have to my grandchild and heir I strictly
charge him to follow his studies in his youth, that he do shun ill
company gaming debauchery and engagements, by such unhappy means having
known many noble men and gentlemen ruined. And I especially enjoin him
to take the advice of his mother and other friends in his marriage,
when it shall please God he be fit for it, if I live not to see it, and
I pray God to bless him. And could I have done more for my family than
I have done I would, and had done much more for them, had not I had so
great losses by the late calamitous times.”
Thomas Hobbes, of Gray’s Inn (1632), had also one especial object of
his anxiety and affection. “And whereas the Lord hath left me now
one only tender plant for raising my posterity, whose religious and
virtuous education and transplanting into some godly family in a fit
season of marriage is my greatest worldly care, my humble request
unto the Right Honourable the master of his Majesty’s ward and his
associates is, that the wardship of my sole daughter and heir and of
her lands may be granted to my approved loving cousin Peter Phesant
of Gray’s Inn, and Richard Bellingham of Lincoln’s Inn, Esquires. And
my earnest desire and serious charge to them is, that they permit my
said daughter to be continually abiding and educated with my worthy
respected friend Mrs. Moore, if she shall be pleased to perform so
great a kindness, and in testimony of my grateful respect to her
undertaking the said charge of my daughter I bequeath to her my best
diamond ring.... And I further wish that my said friends ... as shall
educate my said daughter, as is aforesaid, during her wardship, shall
have the further government of her after her wardship expired until her
age of one and twenty years.... And I do expressly charge and command
in the Lord my said daughter, her weak and tender constitution of body
well considered, that she consent not to be married to any whomsoever
before her age of eighteen years at the soonest, nor after such her
age and before her age of one and twenty years without such consent
as hereunder I require; nor to any man whensoever, but such as is of
an approved holy just and sober conversation, preferring one of a
competent estate and degree, fearing the Lord, before the greatest that
may be, being profane or licentious.”
Of Bishop Corbet’s solicitude for his son we have seen something, nor
could anything exceed the kindliness of John Pybus (v. p. 166). Such
feelings are summed up in the prayer of Anne Covert, widow of Sir
Walter Covert, in the eighth year of Charles I. “And for my children,
O God, I give and bequeath them all into Thy gracious protection, most
earnestly desiring Thy temporal and spiritual blessings to continue
with them both here and hereafter.” So human and emotional these old
wills often are.