John’s mother took her husbands’ death very hard. She could no longer run the stable business that her husband ran for so many years. With these facts in place, Frances then looks to remarry to help run the business. Barely two months after her husbands’ death, she remarried a minor bank clerk named William Rawlings on June 27, 1804. William was a fortune hunter and the children did not like him at all. Mr. Rawlings did not care about anything but money during their marriage, which made the marriage an indefinite disaster. Upon the end of their ill-fated marriage John, along with his other siblings were sent to live with their grand parents, months later Frances moved in also. Frances also left Mr. Rawlings with the stables she inherited from her late husband Thomas, and from that day forward Frances health began to dwindle away.
The times up until know have been very hard on the Keats family, especially hard on the children, they only get worse as time goes on. The children loved being around their grandparents and living with them, they cared very deeply about them. On March 8, 1805, John Keats grandfather died of natural causes. With his death not only did grief and sorrow fill the families heart; his death also brought on a financial burden, which will seem to consume John for the rest of his life.
This issue of money all began when Mr. Jennings, being the gullible person he was, hired a land surveyor, not a lawyer to write his will. The sneaky land developer intentionally made John’s grandfathers’ will to be extremely vague and ill written. Mr. Jennings real wishes were obscured and open to interpretation.
The fight over shares in the estate began shortly after his death (and ended long after John Keats’ death). John’s grandmother was left with about half of the income, which she and her husband had to live on. To live comfortably, she moved into a smaller home and attempted to save what she could. In her own will, John’s grandmother appointed Richard Abbey trustee and guardian of her grandchildren. At this time she felt he would be a great help to the children when she passed on.