Charles Darwin died at Down house during the afternoon of April 19, 1882. Janet Brown describes the moment in her biography (Charles Darwin: The Power of Place p. 495).
He died on the afternoon of 19, April 1882, after sinking very low for two or three days beforehand and suffering what Emma called "fatal attack" at midnight on the 18th. There was no deathbed conversion, no famous last words. "I am not the least afraid to die," he apparently murmured to Emma. "Remember what a good wife you have been." Allfrey signed the death certificate giving "Angina Pectoris Syncope" as the cause of death, the gradual ceasing of the heart. He was seventy-three.
The subtitle of Janet Browne's book (The power of Place) alludes to the remarkable status that Darwin achieved following publication of On the Origin of Species. Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey at a huge funeral held on Wednesday, April 26, 1882. He was buried next to Sir John Herschel near the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, "... an honorable place but not as close to [Charles] Lyell as Emma had hoped" (Browne, p. 497).
Here's a list of the pallbearers from
AboutDarwin.com.
George Campbell - The 9th Duke of Argyll
William Cavendish - The 7th Duke of Devonshire
Edward Henry Stanley - The 15th Earl of Derby
James Russell Lowell - The American Ambassador to Britain
William Spottiswoode - Mathematician, physicist, the Queen's Printer, and friend of Darwin
Joseph Dalton Hooker - Darwin's close friend and champion of his Theory of Evolution
Thomas Henry Huxley - Darwin's close friend and champion of his Theory of Evolution
Alfred Russel Wallace - Darwin's friend and the co-founder of Natural Selection
Sir John Lubbock - The 1st Baron of Avebury, Darwin's next door neighbor and close friend
Here's the report of the funeral published in The Times on Thursday, April 27, 1882 [
Wikisource]. (...)