“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 [Pg 124] 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 [Pg 125] 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 [Pg 126] 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 [Pg 127] 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, [Pg 128] 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 abstai............