"Father was taken very ill last night with great suffering. They sent Dr Allfrey and he staid [sic] the night and was a great support to Mother. She was all alone with Bessy. They sent for Dr Moxon and he came just to see him take his last breath. Mother said he was happy to die and sent us all an affectionate message. He told her he was not the least afraid to die. Mother is very calm but she has cried a little."

You will come at once. Your H.E.L. (Henrietta Litchfield to her brother, George Darwin, 20 April 1882)

Five days later a funeral car drawn by four horses brought Charles Darwin's body to Westminster Abbey. It took almost an entire day to travel the 16 miles from Downe, a small village in Kent (which had recently added an "e" to its name to avoid confusion with County Down), and in its wake came three of Darwin's sons - Francis, Leonard and Horace. They were joined at the Abbey by William and George, and all five sons accompanied the coffin as it was carried through the south cloister to St Faith's Chapel, a quiet narrow space between the south transept (Poets' Corner) and the Chapter House. There it remained all night, dimly lit by two oil lamps, covered with a cloth of black velvet and watched over by a guard.

By mid-morning the next day the coffin had been moved to the porch of the Chapter House, inside which had gathered aristocrats, statesmen, scientists and representatives of the Universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dublin as well as members of learned bodies and institutions and Darwin's publisher John Murray. The family, meanwhile, assembled in Jerusalem Chamber, not, however, Darwin's widow, Emma, who preferred to remain at Downe.

Shortly before noon, after the Abbey's great bell had tolled for almost quarter of an hour, the funeral cort&#233ge left the Chapter House. It was joined at the end of the south cloister by members of the family. Led by the choir and clergy, the procession then entered the Abbey by the south-west cloister door, moved slowly down the south aisle to the west end, turned and passed up the nave and into the choir. Ten pall-bearers accompanied the coffin - Darwin's colleagues Huxley, Hooker, Wallace and Lubbock, the American Ambassador James Russell Lowell, Canon Farrar, an earl, two dukes and the President of the Royal Society. The coffin then rested under the lantern while the first portion of the burial service was read. Music by Purcell and Croft was sung, as well as an anthem composed for the occasion by the Abbey's deputy organist, J. Frederick Bridge - "Happy the man that findeth wisdom and getteth understanding".

When the time came for the burial, the procession re-formed and moved to the north-east part of the nave where a grave had been dug beneath the Abbey pavement. Darwin's two daughters, Henrietta and Bessy, along with other principal female mourners, sat for this part of the service, while the rest stood, as Darwin was buried beside his mentor, Sir John Herschel, and some ten feet from the monument to Sir Isaac Newton. The service ended with the choir singing Handel's funeral anthem - "His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore".

That morning, The Times, after reminding its readers that entombment in Westminster Abbey had become "a standard by which great men's deeds and their vitality are measured", noted that the decision to honour Darwin in this way had aroused little surprise and scarcely any adverse comment.

The family had initially assumed that he would be buried beside his brother Erasmus at Downe and had even commissioned a local carpenter to make his coffin. But Darwin's cousin, the eugenist Francis Galton, whose interest in heredity had been fired by his reading of The Origin of Species, was determined that Darwin should be buried with full honours. He sought the support of his colleagues in the Royal Society, an elite scientific body, and of its President, William Spottiswoode. A telegram was sent to the Darwin family, in the name of the Royal Society, asking if they would consent to an interment in the Abbey. William, the eldest son, warmly supported this suggestion, and eventually his mother concurred, reflecting that her husband would have welcomed this public acknowledgement of his achievement.

Spottiswoode then consulted with Darwin's friend and defender, Professor T. H. Huxley, with clerics and others. Before two days had passed a formal request that Darwin be buried in Westminster Abbey had been signed by 28 dignitaries. On receiving this, the Dean of Westminster Abbey, who was in France, telegraphed his "cordial acquiescence". Thus Charles Darwin, who had been "ignored in life by official representatives", as Huxley wrote, was buried in the Abbey "by the will of the intelligence of the people".

The Times admitted that "his mortal remains ... would have rested not inharmoniously under the tall elms in the quiet churchyard of Down[e]", but argued that the Abbey was a more fitting place. "The Abbey has its orators and Ministers who have convinced reluctant senators and swayed nations. Not one of them has wielded a power over men and their intelligences more complete than that which for the last 23 years has emanated from a simple country home in Kent."

Darwin had moved to Down House in 1842 and from there had conducted a correspondence with a diverse range of people from all over the British Empire, among them enthusiasts and amateurs as well as the leading scientific figures of his day. Natural historians, botanists, mining engineers, missionaries and magistrates were among those who helped supply him with the information he needed. This he collated and collected, thereby creating a foundation of facts that would sustain and support his theories. He was not alone in his interest in evolution, for which there was plenty of circumstantial evidence by 1830. Among the proponents of this idea was his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose theory had been hotly disputed. But in the absence of any convincing explanation of the mechanism behind evolution, many scientists accepted the dogmas of Creationism, finding in nature evidence of intelligent providential design and believing that God had created all species in their current state of perfection.

Charles Darwin, however, was haunted by two realisations: that species gradually become modified over time; and that organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their manner of existence.

Aware that selection was the method by which humans successfully bred animals or cultivated plants, he nevertheless could not see how this applied to organisms living in a state of nature until in 1838 he read Thomas Malthus's The Principle of Population (1798) and realised the significance of the struggle for existence. From then on his principle of natural selection became the main directive force in the evolutionary process. Nature, no longer the product of divine intervention, became for him an immutable chain of material causes and effects. The "hidden bond" created by succession and inheritance knits all nature past and present together, forming, in Darwin's phrase, "an inextricable web of affinities".

Within his own lifetime, he saw the whole course of modern science altered by his speculations. Inevitably, his theories fuelled debate as to the relation in which natural science stands to religious belief. The Origin of Species, with its meticulous survey of life-forms and the conditions that governed their development, concludes with a rapturous celebration of the multiplicity of life and the laws and chance accommodations within the evolutionary process. In the second edition, however, issued soon after the first, he added the phrase "by the Creator" to his final sentence, thereby re-admitting the notion of divine agency, possibly to mollify his readers.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Despite this and other alterations, Darwin's theories undermined orthodox religious teaching, chiefly because, as Noel Annan has pointed out, The Origin of Species introduced the idea that chance begot order: "Fortuitous events, not planned or rational but fortuitous, resulted in a physical law: the process of natural selection, achieved by minute accidental variations in the species, broke the principle of internal determinism so that links in the Chain of Being fell apart." Much has happened since the book appeared, but even today, though details need revision, Darwin's message remains essentially intact, his thesis still able to support more that 140 years of scientific advance.

With the publication of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, Darwin shifted the focus of evolutionary debate, treating man as yet another species subject to mutable production. By then, he had become, in popular thinking, the man who had both robbed God of his role as creator of life, and man of his divine origin. But in all his books and essays, whether writing about geology, coral reefs, barnacles, orchids, or the variation of animals and plants under domestication, whether analysing the movement of climbing plants, the use of insects in fertilising flowers, or on the action of earthworms in modifying the surface of the earth through the assimilation of vegetable matter, he opened up new ways of thinking and perceiving. "In Darwinian theory," Gillian Beer notes, "variability is the creative principle, but the type makes it possible for us to track common ancestry and common kinship."

After his death it was widely argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was in no way inconsistent with religious belief. Certain liberal thinkers, notably Charles Kingsley, had earlier reached this conclusion. But Darwin himself was reluctant to speak out on religious matters. He had been made familiar with the habits and practices of the Christian religion as a child, first at Unitarian Chapel services and then, after the death of his mother when he was eight, through the rites of the Anglican church. As a young man he shared the belief, promoted by natural theology, that the world had been produced by a providential and intelligent Creator.

After he had abandoned the idea of pursuing a medical career, he went up to Cambridge to train for the ministry, on the understanding that life in a country parsonage would not be inimical to the simultaneous pursuit of a scientific interest in natural history. He recorded that as an undergraduate, he "did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible". He was, however, troubled by the question asked by the Bishop in the ordination service - "Do you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit?" - and doubted whether he could answer in the affirmative. Nevertheless two years later, when he set off round the world on his five-year journey as the resident naturalist on board HMS The Beagle, he was still an orthodox Anglican, and in his Autobiography recalled being laughed at by several of the officers for upholding the Bible as the unanswerable authority on some point of morality.

It was during this arduous journey that he acquired "the habit of energetic industry and concentrated attention to whatever I was engaged in". From then on everything that he read or thought was made to bear directly on what he saw or was likely to see. And the progress of his thought made it necessary for him to abandon his belief in the Old Testament creation story, in miracles and free will. By slow degrees he came also to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation, but he still clung to a theistic view of the world. Frank Burch Brown has suggested that ambivalence characterises Darwin's theology at every stage of its evolution, and though he became decidedly agnostic he could not rid himself, as he admits in his Autobiography, of "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including men ... as the result of blind chance or necessity."

In 1878 James Grant, a fishing tackle maker, wrote to him, wanting to know whether or not his discoveries had destroyed the evidence for God, as found in nature's phenomena. Darwin's reply is lost; but from Grant's subsequent letter it is evident that Darwin had replied in a "kindly spirit" with a solution that neither upheld nor destroyed his correspondent's beliefs but encouraged independent thought. "I do not feel," Grant replied sadly, "that I can place any reliance upon instinct or intuition in relation to the existence of God." This refusal to dogmatise made Darwin an unlikely Devil's Chaplain - the name he once used of himself. Nevertheless, had he died in France, it was commented at the time of his death, no priest would have taken part in the funeral; or, if he had, no scientist would have been present. Ironically, the man whose work had had such a devastating effect on orthodox religious beliefs, which he himself rejected, was buried at Westminster Abbey, in the eyes of the nation, with a service that gave full expression to Christian hope.

Among the witnesses to this event were Darwin's two faithful servants, Joseph Parslow and his successor William Jackson, both of whom had walked in the procession with the family and the dignitaries. A noticeable omission at the Abbey had been any representative - other than its Chancellor the Duke of Devonshire - from Cambridge University, which had in 1877 conferred on Darwin an LLD (Doctor of Laws), an event that has gone down as one of the most memorable in the University's history. But on the day of the funeral a notice appeared in The Times: the Vice-Chancellor and his Council of Senate were approaching the election of the Regius Professor of Hebrew and a statute regulating the election required the Vice-Chancellor and every member of council to be present when the candidates delivered their expositions on portions of Hebrew books. As the time for their delivery had been fixed a month before, it could not be postponed and the University could do no more than send a regretful apology.

In later years the sight of primroses worn on "primrose day", in commemoration of Disraeli, always reminded Darwin's son, George, of his father, for he shared the anniversary of his death with the Prime Minister. Charles Darwin had impressed many in his lifetime with his essential simplicity, nobility, goodness and humour, his powers of observation and deduction, his passion for truth and dedication to his task, his hatred of cruelty and injustice; but as time went on he increasingly became one of the nineteenth century's most influential giants. Gwen Raverat, born into the Darwin family three years after his death, grew up intensely aware of her grandfather. While Emma Darwin continued to spend part of the year at Down House, where she, her husband and their seven surviving children had lived in an atmosphere of greatest affection, the "faint flavour of the ghost" of Charles Darwin hung about the whole place, "house garden and all", as Gwen recalled:

"Of course, we always felt embarrassed if our grandfather were mentioned, just as we did if God were spoken of. In fact, he was obviously in the same category as God and Father Christmas. Only, with our grandfather, we also felt, modestly, that we ought to disclaim any virtue in having produced him. Of course it was very much to our credit, really, to own such a grandfather; but one mustn't be proud, or show off about it; so we blushed and were embarrassed and changed the subject ..."

Because she was, as she admits, a "very high-minded and pure ... not to say arrogant" child, it irritated her when people made jokes about her family being descended from monkeys. She thought it stupid and in very poor taste. It exposed the downside of Charles Darwin's legacy. For though her relatives were securely established within the higher echelons of the professional classes, they were also regarded with mistrust, teased, insulted, and often provoked to justify and uphold Charles Darwin's achievement. Inevitably, this tightened the bond between them, generating among Darwins an exceptional degree of loyalty and family identity.

It had been Darwin's habit to keep a record of his working life, noting down in his journal the date on which he started a book and the weeks, months or years it took to produce. But as well as originating new books he was also revising old ones and correcting the proofs of both. "Jan 17 Began Expression [of the Emotions in Man and Animals]" reads his record for 1871, "and finished final rough copy on April 27. Many interruptions. June 18th Began 6th edit[ion] of Origin. Oct 29th finished it but lost 2 months by illness. Nov and Dec proofs of do [the same] and Expression." The outcome of all this industry was that he left his family, among other things, a major literary inheritance; and one of the first things that needed to be obtained after his death, for the purposes of probate, was a valuation of the copyright on all of his books.

This George Darwin sought from John Murray. Simultaneously he asked if he and his brother William might learn the conditions under which his father and Murray had conducted business. "We also think it would be desirable that we, as trustees of our father's estate, should have some written arrangement with yourself as to the future." He proposed that William Hacon, his father's solicitor, might visit Murray in order to make the necessary arrangement, and in a letter sent soon afterwards, he requested that no further reprints of his father's books be produced until Murray had spoken to Hacon. Murray was clearly ruffled by these proceedings which he felt showed a want of courtesy towards his firm. On learning this, William Darwin hastily wrote to assure him of their hope "that whatever business relations we may have together may be carried on in as friendly a spirit as that which animated your dealings with our Father ... our action was governed by the consideration that where trustees have rights, it becomes a duty incumbent on them to look at the rights."

These rights were far from insignificant. The fresh burst of interest in Charles Darwin's work, stimulated by his death, made necessary not only numerous reprints but also the production of more serviceable editions, and by 1887 indexes for both Origin and Descent had been completed. When it was first published, On the Origin of Species had sold out in a day. By the time the sixth edition appeared in 1872 the word "On" had been omitted from the title. The following year Murray's put out a seven-shillings-and-sixpence edition, almost half the price of the original book, and in 1885 a six-shillings edition was produced which sold around 2,000 copies every year for the next 15 years, until 1900, when Murray, in order to defy competitors, had the book "stereotyped" and brought out a "library" edition which sold at half a crown. When the first statement of account reached William Darwin six months after his father's death, he was pleased to see a balance of £1,023 19s. id. Thereafter Charles Darwin's books brought in around £2,000 a year which was paid into an account held jointly by William and George.

The money itself did not significantly alter the Darwin family finances. Charles Darwin had not only been a shrewd investor, buying shares in the railways and farm land in Lincolnshire, but the year before he died, he had also inherited half his brother Erasmus's estate, valued at around £130,000. In addition a Mr Anthony Rich, an admirer of Charles Darwin's work, had informed Darwin in 1879 that he intended leaving him and his descendants a large property. Darwin had protested at the time that he was already a rich man and he did so again after he received Erasmus's inheritance, but Rich remained firm in his intent. In 1879, by which time Darwin was providing his five sons with an annual allowance of £400, also dividing his surplus income each year between them, he estimated that the combined value of his property, together with Erasmus's and Mr Rich's bequest, meant that, after his wife's death, each of his sons would receive at least £40,000. In fact they were to receive over £10,000 more than this estimate.

One motivation behind Darwin's generosity towards his sons was his fear that his children would not be strong enough to support themselves and live normal, healthy lives. He worried that there was a hereditary weakness in the family, a peculiarity of the nervous system. Eating green peas was enough to cause Darwin's brother Erasmus to relapse into a semi-permanent state of invalidism. Charles's own life, his son Francis claimed, had been "one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness". Various theories have been advanced to explain Darwin's ill health, including the notion that he had caught Chagas's disease in South America during his voyage on The Beagle. Others suggest that there were psychological causes behind his ill health and that either his relationship with his kind but overbearing father, the suppression of painful emotions, or the anxiety bred in him by the implications and reception of his theories subjected him to great stress. But, owing to the lack of medical records, no definite conclusions can be drawn. The only extant recollection of Darwin by a physician is that by a Dr Edward Wickstead Lane, who ran a hydropathic establishment at Moor Park in Farnham, Surrey. His conclusion was that Darwin suffered greatly from "an aggravated form of dyspepsia, brought on ... by the extreme sea-sickness he underwent in HMS Beagle ... When the worst attacks were on he seemed almost crushed with agony, the nervous system being severely shaken, and the temporary depression resulting distressingly great."