Iain McCalman - Darwins Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution

Charles Darwins funeral took place at Westminster Abbey on Wednesday 26 April 1882. Twenty years earlier, the English press had taunted him as The Devils Disciple, the scientist whose theory of evolution had dethroned the divine creator and turned man into the cousin of the monkey. Now the Pall Mall Gazette spoke for all in comparing him to Copernicus and calling him the greatest Englishman since Newton. The more than two thousand mourners at the Abbey made up a Whos Who of the Victorian establishment. So many had applied for admission cards that the undertakers were rattled.

The body had arrived at eight oclock the evening before, after a horse-drawn journey from the village of Downe, in Kent, accompanied for the sixteen miles by three of Darwins sons and an icy drizzle. The white oak coffin, bearing the simple inscription Charles Robert Darwin, Born February 12, 1809. Died April 19, 1882, was carried into the dim lamplight of the Abbeys Chapel of St Faith, where it perched like a small ship in dry dock.

Shortly before eleven oclock the next day, the Darwin family, friends and a few servants made their way into the Jerusalem Chamber. Dignitaries took their positions in the Chapter House, and the choir assembled in the stalls. The pews on the south side of the nave registered the whispers of frock-coated scientists, philosophers, admirals, ambassadors, museum directors, politicians, philanthropists, civic worthies, university professors and clergymen. Now the non-ticketed seats in the north-western part of the nave and the back rows began to fill with ordinary folk, some plain curious, some keen to pay homage to the man whod once shaken the foundations of the Church. They included a sprinkling of old radicals-Chartists, republicans, and freethinkers like G. J. Holyoake-for whom Darwins ideas had been an inspiration.

A few pointed absences among the countrys mighty were noted, though each claimed an excuse: Queen Victoria was busy preparing for her son Prince Leopolds wedding; Prime Minister Gladstone, a fervent evangelical with no love of Darwins ideas, was caught up in the political mire of the Irish independence struggles; the Archbishop of Canterbury was indisposed and the Dean of Westminster Abbey was abroad.

Other representatives of the Church of England made up for the timidity of their clerical seniors: canons, vergers and clerks were present in abundance. As the bell tolled noon, the Queens Chaplain-in-Ordinary, George Prothero, opened the ceremony with the song I Am the Resurrection, glossing over Darwins well-known scepticism about life after death. Everyone knew that he had rejected the idea of a divine creator whod intelligently designed the world of man and nature: he believed only in natures implacable laws of change, chance, struggle, survival and extinction.

The coffin, a black velvet coverlet draped over it, carried two wreaths-lifebuoys for another world-and a spray of white blossom at the prow. Ten pallbearers bobbed it slowly up the nave to its resting place at the northern end of the choir screen, close to the statue of Sir Isaac Newton. Three of the pallbearers-two dukes and an earl-represented the state and Cambridge University, where Darwin had once been a clerical student. Ambassador James Russell Lowell, another bearer, represented the United States of America. Sir William Spottiswoode, President of the Royal Society, was there for the scientific establishment. Darwins neighbour and friend, Sir John Lubbock, a Liberal MP, London banker and distinguished amateur archaeologist, embodied Victorian government, finance and culture.

Three men in late middle age who also gripped the brass handles of the coffin were there because theyd been Darwins closest friends and intellectual collaborators. Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, aged fifty-seven, was tall and thickset with a beaklike nose and massive side whiskers. Next to him stooped botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, sixty-five, slight and fragile with a leonine ruff of white hair circling his face, which was pale from angina. At the rear was zoogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace, fifty-nine, tall and gangly with a heavy white beard around a kindly mouth.

The modest co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Wallace was a man whom Darwin had revered, despite Wallaces reputation for radical eccentricity. Privately, George Darwin thought it would have been more in keeping with his fathers feelings to have positioned Wallace at the other end of the coffin with his two colleagues. These three scientists belonged together: they were not only the dead mans most committed scientific supporters, but, as fellow southern voyagers, they had also shared with him a special bond of the salt.

As if to remind them of that formative period in all their lives, Darwins coffin came to rest next to another southern traveller, whom Darwin had first met at the Cape of Good Hope half a century earlier. This neighbour in death was the eminent astronomer-philosopher And here he was taking the horizontal for the last time.

The organ sounded a final anthem, Canon Prothero pronounced the Benediction, and Charles Darwin, that most reluctant sailor and fighter, embarked on his last voyage to meet the worms hed been so recently studying.

Locals from Darwins tiny Kentish hamlet of Downe were represented by two long-time family servants, Mary Evans, whod looked after Darwin since he was a boy, and old Mr Parslow, the almost equally long-serving butler. Provision had been made for other villagers to attend the funeral, but none did so. Most believed that Darwin would have hated the Abbey ceremony. Had it been held at the local church of St Marys as theyd hoped, and as hed intended, the pallbearers would not have included all these stiff society folk. Family members, neighbours, and old friends like Hooker, Huxley and Wallace would have carried the coffin to the resting spot Darwin had requested.

The Downe church was small, just a nave and a chancel below a white plaster ceiling and an old timbered roof, but it was dignified in its simplicity. The dwarf tower and tall spire were the first thing travellers glimpsed through the horse chestnut trees as they made their way down from Keston Hill, along a steep winding path cut into the chalk, then across a level meadow and into the village. A huge old elm with a 23-foot girth shadowed the entrance to the church and the adjacent yard. died in infancy, Mary Eleanor and Charles Waring. Here too, in a grassy patch under a large old yew tree, lay two of Darwins Wedgwood cousins, sharing with his elder brother Erasmus a specially commissioned family vault designed to hold twelve. In spite of Charless lack of religious feeling, hed felt this tiny churchyard to be the sweetest place on earth. So when his stuttering heart finally stopped beating at four pm on 19 April, after a week of pain, both the family and the village took it for granted that a quiet local ceremony would be held. Darwin had expressed this wish to his wife Emma a year earlier, when gripped by an intimation of death.