CHAPTER XII.
A CROWN LOST, AND A GRAVE WON.
The Queen’s agitation—Her illness—Her sufferings—Desires her diary may be destroyed—Her death—Sketch of her life—Her mother a foolish woman—Every sense of justice outraged by the King—Inconsistency of the Whigs—The Queen persecuted even after death—Disrespect shown to her remains by the Government—Protest against a disgraceful haste to remove her remains—Course of the funeral procession interrupted by the people—Collision between the military and the populace—Effort to force a way through the people ineffectual—The procession compelled to pass through the City—The plate on the Queen’s coffin removed—The funeral reaches Harwich—The Queen’s remains taken to Brunswick—Funeral oration—Tombs of the illustrious dead there.
The coronation-day killed the Queen. The agitations and sufferings of that eventful day called into deadly action the germs of the disease under which she ultimately succumbed. Once only, between that day and her death, did she appear in public, at Drury Lane Theatre, and even then she may be said to have been dying.
On August the 2nd, the first bulletin issued from Brandenburgh House, by ‘W. G. Maten, P. Warren, and H. Holland,’ announced that her Majesty was suffering from internal inflammation and obstruction. Her sufferings were considerable, but they were borne with resignation; and she even expressed a cheerful readiness to be gone from a world in which she had endured more than she had enjoyed. Her own conviction, from the first, was that her malady would prove fatal. No whisper of hope appeared to deceive or to cheer her. She was determined, as it were, that she must die, and she prepared for the worst. Her feelings were natural to a woman of her disposition and character. She felt that, despite all solemn protestation, notwithstanding all as solemn assertion, she had failed in re-establishing the reputation which she enjoyed during the early years of her residence in this country. The abandonment of the Bill of Pains and Penalties had not rescued her from degradation; and the people, who were ready to offer her consolation as a woman who had been most deeply wronged and outraged, were by no means so ready to espouse her cause further than this. She had herself confessed to indiscretions, and when the confession applies to constant repetition of the offence, the public judgment, even with nothing more to warrant its exercise, will never be slow to hold her who acknowledges so much as being guilty of more. In her position, with a reputation so soiled, and torn, and trodden upon; which could not be made bright by any declaration (poor indeed) that she was not so debased as she was declared to be by her adversaries; for a woman so placed, to die is the sole joy left her, if she has made the peace with God which can never again exist between her and man. Her few friends were accustomed to say that in after years her good fame would be substantiated. After years—alas! Of what use to the drowned sailor is the favourable wind after shipwreck? Assuredly, her own character perished more by her own suicidal acts than by the assaults made upon it by those who were interested in damning it; just as ‘Tom Paine’ himself has said that a writer may destroy his own reputation, which cannot be affected by the pens of other writers.
To die then was now in the very fitness of things, and death made but brief work with his new victim. Between the second and the seventh of August the suffering never ceased sufficiently to warrant serious hope of amelioration. During the intervening time she continued to express her willingness to depart. She signed her will, gave with calmness all necessary orders which she wished to be observed, spoke charitably of all, and little of herself. Among her last acts was one of sacrifice, and perhaps posterity will regret it. She ordered the diary, which she had long kept, and in which she had entered the characters of the most prominent persons with whom she had come in contact, to be burned. This is said to have been done in her presence; but so many things only seem to be done in a dying presence that our successors may not despair, hereafter, of becoming more intimate with Caroline, her thoughts and feelings, than she ever permitted her contemporaries to be. The great chance against posterity being allowed to read the scandalous chronicle or the justifying confessions of Caroline lies in the fact that the series of journals were burned by a foreign female servant, who knew nothing of their value. Such, at least, was the accredited report.
After nearly five days of intense suffering, the Queen sank into a stupor from which she never awoke. At half-past ten o’clock on the morning of the seventh of August, 1821, ‘after an entire absence of sense and faculty for more than two hours,’ Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick, Queen Consort of George IV., expired almost without a struggle. In her supreme hour only her faithful friends, Lord and Lady Hood and Lady Anne Hamilton, were with her. Her legal and medical advisers, with Alderman Wood and one of his sons, were also near her person. She had completed fifty-three years and three months; of these she passed by far the happier and the more innocent half—happier because the more innocent—in Brunswick. Of the following nineteen years spent in England, eighteen of them were passed in separation from, and most of them in quarrelling with, her husband. For the first nine or ten years of this period she lived without offence and free from suspicion; during the remainder she was struggling to re-establish a fame which had been wrongfully assailed; but this was accompanied by such eccentricity and indiscretion that she seemed almost to justify the suspicion under which she had suffered. Then came the half-dozen years of her residence abroad, when she too often shaped her conduct as though she had alacrity in furnishing matter condemnatory against herself to the spies by whom she was surrounded. To say that they exaggerated her offences does not, unfortunately, prove her guiltless of great crime. Her return to England was a bold step, but it was one she was compelled to take. It failed, however, in its great purpose. She did not triumph. Justice, indeed, was not rendered her, for she was condemned before she was tried; and though the trial was not carried to its intended conclusion, he who would now stand forth as the champion of Caroline of Brunswick would be necessarily accounted of as possessing more generosity than judgment.
Nevertheless, for this poor woman there is something to be said. She was ill-educated; religiously educated, not at all; and never had religious principles as expounded by any particular church. Her mother was a foolish, frivolous woman, and her father, whom she ardently loved, a brave, handsome, vicious man, who made his wife and daughters sit down in company with his mistresses. With such an example before her, what could be expected from an ardent, spirited, idle, and careless girl? Much—if she had been blessed with a husband of principle, a man who would have tempered the ardour to useful ends, guided the spirit to profitable purpose, and taught the careless girl to learn and love the cares, or duties, rather, which belonged to her position. But by whom, and what, was that Princess encountered in England, whither she had come to marry a Prince who had condescended to have her inflicted on him, and bringing with her the memories of pleasant communings with more courteous wooers in Brunswick? She met a husband who consigned her to companionship with women more infamous than ever she herself became, and whose interest and business it was to render the wife disgusting to the husband. They speedily accomplished the end they had in view, and when they had driven the wife from the palace they endeavoured to prove her to be guilty of vices which she had not then, in common with themselves and her husband. If he ever justly complained of wrong, he at least took infinite pains to merit all that was inflicted on him. He outraged every sense of justice when, steeped to the very lips in uncleanness, he demanded that his consort should be rendered for ever infamous, for the alleged commission of acts for which he claimed impunity on his own account. She was not, perhaps, betrayed by the Whigs, but these rather took up her cause for the reason that it served them politically than put credence in its righteousness. They were, however, the voluntary champions of her virtue. Lord Holland was among the first of them, and yet in his contemporary Diary he says of her, ‘She was at best a strange woman, and a very sorry and uninteresting heroine. She had, they say, some talent, some pleasantry, some good-humour, and great spirit and courage. But she was utterly destitute of all female delicacy, and exhibited, in the whole course of the transactions relating to herself, very little feeling for anybody, and very little regard for honour and truth, or even for the interests of those who were devoted to her, whether the people in the aggregate, or the individuals who enthusiastically espoused her cause. She avowed her dislike for many, scarcely concealed her contempt for all’ (no wonder); ‘in short, to speak plainly, if not mad, she was a very worthless woman.’ So wrote one who had asserted directly the contrary.
But it was the lot of this unhappy Queen to be persecuted even after death. Her will, in which she bequeathed the little she had to leave to William Austin, the protégé, who did not long survive her, contained a clause to this effect: ‘I desire and direct that my body be not opened, and that three days after my death it be carried to Brunswick for interment, and that the inscription on my coffin be, “Here lies Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England.”’
The government, acting under alleged orders from the King, but influenced, no doubt, by a wish not to mar the festivities attendant upon the visit of George IV. to Ireland, by allowing the Queen’s body to remain longer than needful in England, announced their intention to pay every sort of respect to the orders and wishes of her late Majesty, and to despatch the body to Harwich at once, for embarkation. The personal friends of Caroline protested against this unseemly readiness, on the part of the ministers, to obey the wishes of one who, when alive, never had a wish that was not thwarted. Lady Hood addressed a letter to Lord Liverpool, not so much, indeed, as she said to him, as to his heart. The letter pleaded for delay, on the ground of the Queen’s ladies being unprepared; and it expressly protested against the intended military escort, as being an honour never allowed to the Queen when living, and one not certainly desired by her, who was sufficiently guarded by the people’s love. Reply was made that the arrangements already resolved upon were irrevocable, and that, if the ladies were not provided with the necessary mourning, there would be nothing disrespectful in waiting behind till they had been furnished with what was necessary, and then joining in the procession anywhere on its route. There was a singular want of courtesy in all the communications made by the ministry to the friends of the Queen. The latter could not even learn by what route the body would be conveyed to Harwich. The most direct road was through the City of London, and the mayor and corporation had announced their intention to attend on the royal remains on the passage through the City. The government curtly intimated that the funeral cortège would not be allowed to pass through the City at all. From the same source it was subsequently learned that the coffin would be carried by the circuitous route of the New Road to Romford, and then by the direct road to Harwich. The popular disgust was justifiably great. Lord Liverpool asserted that he and his colleagues were influenced only by feelings which prompted them to show full respect to the wishes of the deceased Queen. How very little the noble lord was really influenced by the feelings in question may be seen in Dean Pellew’s Life of Lord Sidmouth. In that work there is a letter from Lord Liverpool, in which the writer says that he would have despatched the body the whole way by water to Harwich, had he not been afraid of the passage at London Bridge! In other words, he would have paid it as much disrespect as was in his power, only that he feared a popular demonstration of unwelcome character at the bridge.
On the 14th of August, the government authorised the persons employed by them to remove the body from Hammersmith. There had been very scant ceremony displayed in a ‘lying in state,’ and the preparations now were but of a meagre description. A few tawdry escutcheons, a tinsel coronet, heralds in private dresses, and a military escort, looking mournful rather because of the rain, which fell in torrents, than for any other reason.
When Sir George Naylor, in his official tabard, and Mr. Bailey, the undertaker, authorised by government to carry out the prescribed arrangements, entered the room where the body lay, in order to remove it, they were met by Dr. Lushington, who stood at the head of a small group of her Majesty’s friends, and protested against the intended removal, on account of over-haste, and also against the attendance of the soldiery. ‘I enter my solemn protest,’ said the doctor, ‘in right of the legal power which is vested in me by her late Majesty, as executor. I command that the body be not removed till the arrangements suitable to the rank and dignity of the deceased are made.’ Mr. Bailey declared that, with the authority he held, the body must be removed. ‘Touch it not, at your peril,’ exclaimed Dr. Lushington. Mr. Bailey asked if he intended to use or to recommend violence. The legal executor answered that he would neither assist in nor recommend violence. Whereupon the government officer declared that he should discharge his duty firmly and, he hoped, properly.
But he had to encounter a second duel of words with the other executor, Mr. Wilde, who protested as Dr. Lushington had done, and to as little purpose. Mr. Bailey said that his orders were imperative, and he would take upon himself the responsibility and peril of removing the body.
The procession then set out, and never had Queen a funeral of such strange ceremony and circumstance. The mourners comprised those friends and legal advisers who have been so often named: some of them were not in the mourning coaches, but in their own private carriages. It was a strictly government funeral (the King, it was said, paid all the expenses); but there was a multitude who descended into the streets on that day. There were many among them who deemed that the funeral charges would, after all, be defrayed out of the public pocket. They were accordingly determined that their own programme should be followed, and that the body of the Queen should be carried through the City of London. The ministers, unwisely, were as obstinately bent in dragging the dead Queen through the outskirts, and getting her to Harwich in as unceremonious a manner as possible. They professed great respect, but it is certain that they meant none, and it was because the people were convinced of this that they occupied the highways on that stormy morning, resolute to bear the inanimate Caroline, as it were, and as she had desired, on the popular shoulders, through the very centre of the great metropolis.
It was between seven and eight o’clock when the funeral procession, escorted by or rather partly made up of, cavalry, passed through Hammersmith. It met with no obstruction until it reached Kensington Church. At this point the first attempt to turn out of the direct road leading to the City, by conducting the cortège up Church Street into the Bayswater Road, was met by a hoarse cry of execration on the part of the people. They went further than protest. In a brief space of time the road was dug up, rendered impassable, and obstructed by a barricade that would have won the approval of a Parisian professor of tumults. The military escort kept their places and their tempers; but the Life Guards, with the chief magistrate of Bow Street, Sir Richard Baker, speedily appeared. They saw the uselessness of attempting to force a passage; and when the order was given to proceed in the direct route to London, there broke forth a thundering shout of victory about the hearse of the unconscious Queen, as though expressly raised to give her assurance that the people had compelled respect to her will.
In the Park the multitude had spent many of the morning hours in rushing from the south to the north side, from the north to the south; and again and again repeating the same movement, according as report reached them that the funeral would pass by one or the other line. The issue of the struggle at Kensington having been announced in the Park, the great body of the people there had now moved once more to the south side, and were pouring into the Knightsbridge Road. Meanwhile, orders had been received from ministers, by Sir Richard Baker and the commander of the Life Guards, to lead the procession through the Kensington Gate of Hyde Park into the Edgeware Road. But at the gate the scene which had been enacted at Church Street was replayed with some additions. The people forcibly held the gates closed, placed every impediment in the way which they could collect, and were so fiercely demonstrative with their cry of ‘The City! the City!’ that magistrate and military again yielded to the popular will, and the body, which had halted amid the tumult, was once again carried forward amid shouts of triumph.
The delay had afforded time to Sir Richard Baker to apply to ministers for fresh instructions. These were forwarded to him in a peremptory order to see that the procession was conducted into the Edgeware Road, either by the east side of the Park or through Park Lane. At both points the suspicious and exasperated populace were ready for the expected contest. It was here that the matter assumed a more serious aspect than it had yet worn. The soldiery began to grow chafed at an opposition which, in its turn, began to be emphasised by the employment of missiles. The attempt to pass up the Park was made in vain; that to force Park Lane was equally ineffectual. But while the struggle was raging at the latter point the line of procession was broken, and that part of it near the gate turned into the Park, carrying the hearse with it. The military at Park Lane turned back, followed the successful Mr. Bailey and his followers, and closing the gates upon the public, the body of the Queen was borne, at an unseemly pace, onwards to Cumberland Gate. But the increasingly-excited people were light of foot, and when the head of the funeral line reached Cumberland Gate, with the intention to proceed, not down Oxford Street to the City, but up the Edgeware and, subsequently, the New Road, there was a compact mass resolved to give no passage, and determined to carry the royal corpse through the metropolis. It was here that Sir Robert Wilson endeavoured to mediate between the multitude and the military. The commander of the latter had no discretionary power, and could only obey his orders. His men, hitherto, had exhibited great forbearance, but their patience was overcome when they found themselves fairly attacked by the populace at this point. Neither mob nor soldiers were really culpable. The blame rested entirely with the ministry, whose folly and obstinacy had provoked the conflict, and made victims on both sides. The military (by which is to be understood the Life Guards, and not the ‘Blues,’ who formed part of the procession, and were quiescent throughout the day) at last fired a volley, by which several persons were severely injured, and two men, Francis and Honey, were slain. Not a few of the military were seriously wounded by the missiles flung at them in return, but the hitherto victors were vanquished. They gave way, and across the blood that had been spilt, and among the wounded lying around, the people’s Queen, as they called her, was once more carried on the way which the respectful feelings of the ministry taught them it was best for her to go.
The defeat and the victory seemed respectively accepted by the different parties. The individuals having the body in charge, and the escort, pushed hurriedly forward with the hearse towards the New Road. But several of the mourners here left a procession to form part of which was attended with peril to life. The multitude looked moodily on; but suddenly, as if by common impulse, perhaps at suggestion of some shout, they, too, rushed forward, determined to make one more attempt at achieving a victory for themselves and the unconscious Queen.
They who were conducting the body along the New Road towards Romford did not dream of further opposition, and their astonishment was great when, on arriving at Tottenham Court Road, they found all progress, east or northward, completely obstructed, and no way open for them but southward, towards the City. In this direction they were compelled to turn, hailed by the popular exultation, and met with shouts of execration and menace, as they sought, but vainly, at each outlet down the east side of Tottenham Court Road, to find a passage back into the suburban line. In the same way the procession was forced down Drury Lane, into the Strand. Sir Richard Baker did not yield to anything but compulsion, yet he lost his office, as Sir Robert Wilson did his commission, for endeavouring to do his duty under most trying and difficult circumstances. Once in the Strand, the people felt that their victory had been fairly and irrevocably achieved. When the royal body was carried under Temple Bar, its advent there was hailed with such a wild ‘hurrah’ as had never met the ears of living sovereign. For seven hours that body had been dragged through wind, and rain, and mud—the King’s will drawing it in one direction, the people in another. How much or how little the latter were influenced by earnest attachment to her for whom, dead, they made their demonstration, even to the shedding of blood, it is not easy to say. There is less difficulty in coming to the decision that they who professed to be carrying out the King’s commands served him ill, and even perilled his crown on that day. The King himself, however, is known to have been exceedingly wroth against the government for not having employed more stringent measures in order to fulfil his commands. The triumph of a dead wife embittered more than one joyous banquet in the Irish capital.
The civil authorities of the City, hurriedly collected for the occasion, accompanied the royal remains as far as the eastern limit of the City’s ‘liberty,’ Whitechapel. Thence to Romford the funeral train proceeded at a very varied pace, sometimes as slowly as became the solemnity of a funeral, at others the pace would have been counted lively enough for a wedding. At Romford, the mourners who had rejoined the cortège passed the night, but the royal corpse was carried on to Colchester, where it rested for the night, in St. Peter’s Church.
It was during this night that the silver plate announcing the occupant of the coffin as ‘the injured,’ or, according to some, ‘the murdered, Queen of England,’ was affixed to the lid. Whenever this was done the plate was not allowed to remain. It was removed and replaced by another, inscribed simply with the deceased’s name and titles and dates, in the usual form. They who have visited the vaults beneath the Church of St. Blaize, the patron of Brunswick, may remember that the marks of the nails which fastened the original plate are still visible.
The journey to Harwich was unmarked by any particular incident, save that everywhere along the route the feeling of curiosity to see the remains of Caroline pass to their last resting-place was accompanied by manifest evidences of respect. Off Harwich were awaiting the Glasgow frigate, two sloops of war, three brigs, and the Pioneer schooner. The coffin was conveyed to the latter, after being unceremoniously swung into a barge, and from the schooner it was transferred to the Glasgow. The little group of mourners followed. They consisted of Lord and Lady Hood, Lady Anne Hamilton, Mr. Austin, Dr. and Mrs. Lushington, and Count Vassali. Her Majesty’s remains were now in charge of Captain Doyle, who, when a midshipman, more than a quarter of a century before, had handed the rope to the royal bride, whereby to help her on board the Jupiter. The squadron set sail, under a salute from Languard fort, and at two o’clock p.m., on Sunday, the 19th, it anchored in the harbour of Cuxhaven.
The Gannet sloop of war conveyed the body up the Elbe to the mouth of the Schwinde, and up the latter it was carried, with a guard of marines and the mourners, by the boats belonging to the Wye sloop, as far as Stade. From this place to Brunswick the body of the unhappy Caroline was borne, by slow journeys, and amid profuse respectful demonstrations on the part of the people. One of its resting-places by the way was at Zell, in the church of which place the body lay for a night upon the tomb of the unfortunate sister of George III., Caroline Matilda Queen of Denmark.
At midnight on Friday, August 24, the last rites were performed over the deceased consort of George IV. The body had been removed from the hearse to a funeral car, which was drawn by some hundred Brunswickers to the cathedral gates. No extraordinary service was allowed to be celebrated at the side of the vault. The Duke of Brunswick was then a minor and an absentee, and the government of the country was administered by the King of England. But though the service was of the most ordinary character, the sexagenarian pastor, Woolf, pronounced an oration above the remains of the Queen. He thanked God for adorning her with high advantages of mind and body, for bestowing upon her a heart full of clemency and benignity, and for placing her where she could, and was resolved to, accomplish much good. But ‘unsearchable, O Eternal, are thy ways!’ was the perplexed pastor’s cry as he adverted to her subsequent career—for terminating which the wisdom of the Almighty was again to be revered.
Among the range of coffins in the vault beneath the cathedral of St. Blaize, at Brunswick, Caroline rests between two which contain two heroic but far from faultless men—her father, who fell at Jena, and her brother, who, at the head of his Black Brunswickers, also fell in avenging him at Waterloo. Speaking of the latter, ‘two small black flags,’ says Russell, ‘the one an offering from the matrons, the other from the maidens of Brunswick, are suspended above his coffin, and its gaudy gold and crimson are still mixed with the brown and withering leaves of the garlands which the love of his people scattered on his bier, when at midnight he was laid among so many of his race who had fought and fell like himself.’ Between the coffins of these two lies that of Caroline of Brunswick, between father and brother slain. Her mother died in exile, yet in her own land; and the grave of her murdered sister Charlotte, the first wife of the Prince of Wurtemburg, would be sought for in vain. Surely here was a household sternly dealt with.
On the Sunday following the funeral the venerable pastor, Woolf, preached a sermon appropriate to the event, and which ended in a panegyric on the character of the Queen. The old man, with singular tenacity, clung to the assertion, that in early life ‘her quick understanding eagerly received every ray of divine truth, and her warm heart and lively feelings were excited and elevated by piety.’ He declared that her sense of religion increased to a confirmed faith, and that pious occupations were dear to her heart. ‘I knew her,’ said the aged advocate, ‘as an enlightened Christian, before she left the country of her birth. She first received from my hands, with pious emotion, the holy Supper of our Lord, and the solemnity of her manner was like her precious devotions, an unsuspected proof of her sincere faith and pious feeling.’ The panegyric would have been, like most articles of the kind, far above the merit of the subject, were it not for the strong qualifying sentence in which the preacher acknowledged that ‘the sense of religion, it was true, did not always preserve her from infirmities and errors;’ but, as he asked after the admission, ‘Where is the mortal, where has there been a saint, who has been always perfect? And,’ said he, aptly and truly enough, whether addressed to the friends or the foes of the poor, ill-used, and erring Caroline of Brunswick—‘And he who erred less may conscientiously ask himself whether he owes that to himself or to his more fortunate situation and the undeserved grace of God?’ It is a query which we are all bound to make when viewing a brother or a sister of the human family who is reputed guilty of offence towards God or man. The latter is ever ready to condemn his neighbour, but never ready to pass sentence on himself. Happy for all that with God there is not only judgment but mercy.
There has been some discussion as to whether Caroline of Brunswick was legally married to the Prince of Wales. There is no doubt, however, to be entertained on the matter. Her husband had, unquestionably, previously married a Roman Catholic lady, and that lady was living when the Prince married Caroline of Brunswick.
By the well-known statute of William and Mary, marrying a Roman Catholic entails exclusion from, and incapability ever to inherit, the crown of this realm.
The Prince clearly forfeited his right to the Crown by his marriage with a Papist.
But he married the lady (with the King’s connivance, he said) without the King’s consent; and, wanting that consent, the marriage (according to the 12th of George III.) was null and void.
This would set aside the marriage, but it would not release the Prince from the consequence of having entered into such a marriage. Horne Tooke was not justified in sneering at the 12th of George III., nor in writing ‘legally, really, worthily, and happily for the country, Mrs. Fitzherbert is Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.’
The Roman See, it is said, satisfied Mrs. Fitzherbert’s scruples by considering the marriage legal. That See never considered any other marriage between such (religious) parties, so celebrated, legal. Had there been issue of such an union, grave peril might have arisen. There was, indeed, a claimant to such honour, but he disappeared. He lacked the power of lying since manifested by Orton and some of the Orton gang. The monument to Mrs. Fitzherbert’s memory at Brighton asserts the legality of her marriage with the Prince by the three rings on her finger. That she was as much respected as if her last marriage was as legal as the preceding two there is no shadow of doubt. As little doubt is there that the Prince of Wales was never legally married except to his wayward and unhappy cousin—Caroline of Brunswick.