amounting to 50,000l., and in kind were received, mainly from the working classes. Mr. Burdett-Coutts (then Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett), as special commissioner to the
fund, undertook with great efficiency the
difficult task of organisation and administration. Eventually the refugees were
drafted to Asia Minor. This generous
help from England produced a lasting
impression on the Turkish people, and
endeared the baroness's name to the
Moslem world. On the conclusion of peace
at the close of the Russo-Turkish war in
March 1878 the Sultan conferred on the
baroness the diamond star and first class of
the order of the Medjidie, which was given
to no other woman save Queen Victoria.
To this he subsequently added the grand
cross and cordon of the Chafakat (Mercy),
an order specially established in honour
of ladies assisting in the work of relief.
She was made a lady of grace of the order of
St. John of Jerusalem on 17 Dec. 1888.
In 1879 the baroness in a like spirit served as president of a ladies' committee to aid the sick and wounded in the Zulu war, and she sent out a hospital equipment, trained women nurses forming a special feature of the staff. The voluntary hospitals in the South African war of 1899-1902, where women nurses were reluctantly sanctioned by military authorities, were largely modelled on the Zulu experiment of 1879.
On 12 Feb. 1881 the baroness was married at Christ Church, Down Street, to Mr. William Lehman Ashrnead-Bartlett, who assumed by royal licence the names of Burdett-Coutts and has been unionist M.P. for Westminster from 1885. He was of American birth, his grandparents on both sides having been British subjects [see Bartlett, Sir Ellis Ashmead, Suppl. II], and he had lived in England and been known to the baroness since boyhood. He was already associated in a voluntary capacity with many of her philanthropic schemes, notably in Ireland and Turkey. The difference of ages caused much gossip at the tune ; but by common consent the alliance ensured the baroness's happiness and prolonged her useful work to the end of her life. Her friend, Lady St. Helier, who was well qualified to judge, writes : 'The last years of her life were happy ones, and only those who knew her intimately perhaps realised how much her husband helped her' (Memories of Fifty Years).
The baroness's marriage did not slacken her philanthropic energies and interests. The war in the Soudan in 1884 greatly moved her, and she warmly admired Gordon's character and aims. On 18 Jan. 1884 he paid her a farewell visit at Stratton Street an hour before he left England for the last time. On his asking for some personal memento, she handed him a small letter-case which she always carried, and which was with him to the last. On 10 May 1884, in a letter to 'The Times,' she eloquently expressed the national sentiment, and appealed for his rescue from Khartoum.
In 1889 she opened a pleasure ground which had been made out of the Old St. Pancras cemetery, and she erected there a memorial sun-dial, with a record of famous persons buried there. One of these was Pascal Paoli, the Corsican patriot and refugee. His remains she restored at her own expense, with the approval of the French government, to Corsica, greatly to the Corsicans' satisfaction. In 1896, on her first visit to Corsica, the baroness received a popular ovation.
For the Chicago Exhibition in 1893 she compiled and edited a book describing 'Woman's Work in England,' from which she excluded all mention of herself. The omission was supplied by the duchess of Teck, who arranged for the separate publication at Chicago of a special memoir of the baroness's own work. In a preliminary letter the duchess wrote of the baroness, 'Great as have been the intrinsic benefits that the baroness has conferred on others, the most signal of all has been the power of example an incalculable quantity which no record of events can measure. She has ever sought, also, to increase the usefulness of women in their homes, to extend their opportunities of self-improvement, and to deepen the sources of influence which they derive from moral worth and Christian life.' The baroness died on 30 Dec. 1906 in her ninety-second year, of acute bronchitis, at 1 Stratton Street. For two days the body lay in state there surrounded by innumerable tributes, while nearly 30,000 persons, rich and poor, paid her their last respects. She was accorded burial in Westminster Abbey on 5 Jan. 1907, and was laid there in the nave near the west door, amidst notable demonstrations of popular grief and in the presence of a vast congregation representing nearly all the interests she had lived to serve, from the crown down to the humblest of its subjects.
The baroness's character and career gave philanthropy a new model. In the breadth and sincerity of her sjnnpathies and in the variety of her social and intellectual interests she had no rival
