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Elective English–I

Notes Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured. Also, Trelawney, in his
account of the recovery of Shelley’s body, records that “the face and hands, and parts of the
body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” and by the time that the party returned to
the beach for the cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of
the cremation, he writes of Byron being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the beach.
Shelley’s ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, near an ancient pyramid in
the city walls. His grave bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium (“Heart of Hearts”), and, in
reference to his death at sea, a few lines of “Ariel’s Song” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
“Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and
strange.” The grave site is the second in the cemetery. Some weeks after Shelley had been put
to rest, Trelawny had come to Rome, had not liked his friend’s position among a number of
other graves, and had purchased what seemed to him a better plot near the old wall. The ashes
were exhumed and moved to their present location. Trelawny had purchased the adjacent
plot, and over sixty years later his remains were placed there.
A memorial was eventually created for Shelley at the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey,
along with his old friends, Lord Byron and John Keats.

Shelley’s Heart
Shelley’s widow Mary bought a cliff top home at Boscombe, Bournemouth in 1851. She intended
to live there with her son, Percy, and his wife Jane, and had her own parents moved to an
underground mausoleum in the town. The property is now known as Shelley Manor. When
Lady Jane Shelley was to be buried in the family vault, it was discovered that in her copy of
Adonaïs was an envelope containing ashes, which she had identified as belonging to Shelley
the poet. The family had preserved the story that when Shelley’s body had been burned, his
friend Edward Trelawny had taken the ashes of his heart and kept them himself; some more
dramatic accounts suggest that Trelawny snatched the whole heart from the pyre. These same
accounts claim that the heart was buried with Shelley’s son Sir Percy Florence Shelley. All
accounts agree, however, that the remains now lie in the vault in the churchyard of St Peter’s
Church, Bournemouth.
For several years in the 20th century some of Trelawny’s collection of Shelley ephemera,
including a painting of Shelley as a child, a jacket, and a lock of his hair were on display in
‘The Shelley Rooms’ a small museum at Shelley Manor. When the museum finally closed these
items were returned to Lord Abinger, who descends from a niece of Lady Jane Shelley.

Ancestry

Shelley was a seventeenth-generation descendant of Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel,
through his son John FitzAlan, Marshal of England (d. 1379). John was married to Baroness
Eleanor Maltravers (1345–10 January 1404/1405). Their eldest son succeeded them as John
FitzAlan, 2nd Baron Arundel (1365–1391). He was himself married to Elizabeth le Despenser
(d. 1 April/10 April 1408).

Elizabeth was a great-granddaughter of Hugh the younger Despenser by his second son Edward
Despenser of Buckland (d. 30 September 1342). Her parents were Sir Edward Despenser, 1st
Lord Despenser (24 March 1336–11 November 1375) and Elizabeth Burghersh (d. 26 July 1409).
The eldest son of Elizabeth by Baron Maltravers was John FitzAlan, 13th Earl of Arundel.
Their third son was Sir Thomas FitzAlan of Beechwood. His own daughter Eleanor FitzAlan
was married to Sir Thomas Browne of Beechworth Castle. They had four sons and one daughter,
Katherine Browne, who in 1471 married Humphrey Sackville (1426–24 January 1488), a member of
the powerful Sackville family that had been living at Buckhurst, near Withyham, Kent, since 1068.

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