Peter Featherstone's wills

Peter Featherstone's wills are a succession of competing legal instruments whose changing provisions unsettle the expectations of everyone around the dying landowner. They shape the inheritance struggle at Stone Court, but their deepest consequence is not simply who receives the estate: Mary Garth must refuse Featherstone's attempt to manipulate the documents, then live with the belief that her integrity has cost Fred Vincy a fortune. The later revelation that her action could not have changed Fred's legal position separates moral responsibility from imagined guilt.

The wills and Featherstone's control

Featherstone uses the possibility of changing his will to remind Fred that anticipated inheritance is no secure basis for present borrowing. He accuses Fred of paying ten per cent on money supposedly to be repaid by mortgaging the land after Featherstone's death, and pointedly says that he can still alter his will. Fred denies borrowing on that security, but blushes because he knows he has spoken confidently about inheriting the land as a way to meet current debts. The exchange reveals the wills' power before their contents are known: the prospect of an inheritance already shapes conduct, although the testator retains the power to revoke the expectations built upon it.

On the night he dies, Featherstone insists to Mary that he remains fully capable of deciding what to do with his property. He says he has made two wills and intends to burn one, then gives her the key to his iron chest and explains how to open its concealed catch and take out the topmost paper. Mary refuses. The request is not a neutral act of clerical assistance: destroying a will would determine which of Featherstone's competing intentions could govern his estate. His voice shakes when she will not comply, but she will not handle the chest or destroy the document for him.

The instruments and their changing provisions

At the reading, Mr. Standish identifies three dated documents: an earlier will executed on August 9, 1825; a later will dated July 20, 1826; and a codicil to that later instrument dated March 1, 1828. The existence of a codicil makes the succession more complicated still: the family cannot treat the later will as a single, uncomplicated statement of final intentions, and the assembled relatives wait to learn which provisions have been revoked or amended.

The 1825 will begins with small legacies. Featherstone's brothers and sisters receive two hundred pounds apiece, his nephews and nieces one hundred apiece, and Mrs. Vincy and Rosamond each one hundred pounds. Mr. Trumbull is left a gold-headed cane and fifty pounds, while other cousins receive similarly modest sums. The bequests amount to roughly three thousand pounds, but leave the family guessing about the rest of the money and the land. The reading makes the relatives' calculations visible: they try to manage their feelings while not knowing whether the next document will cancel the apparent benefits.

The first will also gives Fred ten thousand pounds in specified investments. For the Vincys, this is a sudden, dazzling promise; Fred struggles not to smile, and Mrs. Vincy feels herself to be the happiest of women. Yet the will's residuary estate—the remaining personal property and the land—goes to Joshua Rigg, named sole executor and directed to take the name Featherstone. The document thus divides the family’s imagined prize: Fred receives a substantial legacy, but not the residue or the land that many have expected him to inherit.

The second will revokes the earlier provisions except for legacies to the people Featherstone calls low connections, subject to alterations made by the codicil. It gives Joshua Rigg all the land in Lowick parish, together with the stock and household furniture. The remaining property is dedicated to the construction and endowment of almshouses for old men near Middlemarch, on land Featherstone had already bought for the purpose. He declares that he wishes to please God Almighty. The charitable destination gives the will a religious rationale, but it does not reassure the relatives, who receive nothing from the residue; Mr. Trumbull's gold-headed cane is among the few tangible benefits that survive the reading.

Mary Garth's refusal and the cost of imagined responsibility

Mary alone knows that, on his final night, Featherstone offered her money from the box beside him if she would burn one of the wills. Caleb later tells Mr. Farebrother that Featherstone wanted her to destroy the later instrument—the will under which Fred would have received ten thousand pounds. In Caleb's account, the old man had turned toward Fred at the last, making Mary's refusal seem to have deprived him of a possible inheritance. The exact contents of the documents therefore acquire a second meaning after the reading: Mary's private decision is set against the public distribution of the estate, and she is left to imagine what might have happened had she obeyed.

Caleb understands why Mary feels as if, while defending herself rightly, she had accidentally broken someone else's property. Susan Garth, however, insists that Mary could not have acted otherwise, even had she known the consequence for Fred; she was ignorant of it at the time. Her distinction is between the feeling of responsibility and responsibility grounded in knowledge. A loss that falls on another as a consequence of doing right, Susan argues, should not lie on Mary's conscience.

Mr. Farebrother later gives Mary a further reason to release herself from this imagined burden. He has learned that the earlier will would not have been legally effective after the later one was burned: if challenged, it would not have stood, and he is sure it would have been challenged. Mary’s refusal therefore made no real difference to Fred's eventual position. The revelation does not make her distress unreal, but it shows how the emotional force of the two wills had outrun their legal effect. Her act was morally decisive for her, while the outcome she feared was not one her action could have secured.

Inheritance, secrecy, and consequences

The wills frustrate the family’s confidence that kinship or long-standing expectation will determine who inherits. The relatives watch the reading for signs of favor, and the appearance of each sum or property renews their hopes or resentment. Fred's ten thousand pounds in the earlier instrument appears to confirm the future that he had already treated as a means of managing debt, but the later will leaves the land to Joshua Rigg and directs the residue elsewhere. Caleb sums up the reversal: the land everyone had expected to go to Fred was never intended for him, but instead went to the previously concealed son whose inheritance had been kept from the family.

The documents also disclose how uncertain the boundary is between a testator's private intentions and the legal arrangements that can actually govern an estate. Featherstone claims full command of his faculties and of his property, keeps more than one will, and tries at the last moment to influence which document survives. Yet the family cannot simply infer a final intention from his deathbed request; the dates, revocations, and codicil have to be interpreted through formal instruments, and the earlier will would not have prevailed merely because the later one was destroyed. The plot makes the paper record—not family expectation or a private request—the decisive constraint.

That unstable inheritance continues to matter beyond the reading. Caleb later wonders whether the land left to Joshua Rigg might come into Nicholas Bulstrode's hands, recalling that Bulstrode had long wanted a substantial piece of land nearby. The possibility deepens the irony of Featherstone's disposition: the estate moves first to a concealed heir, and its eventual prospects become entangled with the ambitions of another man whom Featherstone hated and would not bank with. Across the documents and the speculation they provoke, inheritance appears less like a settled reward for family connection than a source of leverage, resentment, and consequences that no relative can confidently predict.