DEATH OF QUEEN CAROLINE.
Although Queen Caroline had borne her wrongs and injuries proudly up to the coronation of her husband, yet, by the treatment she on that day received, not only from officials, but the populace, her spirit was at length subdued. She had placed her last stake on the hazard of a day; and having totally failed in her object, sunk under the deepest humiliation. But death came to the relief of all her anxieties and all her woes. Soon afterwards she was attacked with an obstruction of the bowels, which, in her state of mind and body, brought on mortification, and terminated fatally on the 7th of August. Her ruling passion was strong in death. She directed that her remains should be interred in her own country, and that this inscription should be engraved on her tomb:—“Here lies Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England.” Her funeral procession was attended with riots of a serious description. The first stage, where it was to cross the sea, was to Romford in Essex. The road that led to that place from her residence on the banks of the Thames was through the heart of the capital, by her husband’s palace, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Ministers unwisely sought to prevent the corpse from proceeding in this direction, and endeavoured by the military to force it up a narrow street or lane, so that it might reach the northern outskirts of London, and get into the Romford road without occasioning any popular commotion. The populace, however, whose predilection for the queen, now that she was dead, seems to have returned, were determined that the procession should proceed by the natural route. To this end the pavement was torn up, trenches made in the road, and the avenues blocked up in every other direction. The people triumphed; but at Hyde-Park upper-gate a conflict between the military and the people took place, and two of the latter were shot dead. At length the hearse was forced into the city; and here the procession was joined by the lord mayor and other authorities; the shops being closed, and the bells of the different churches tolling. It is said that his majesty, who, at the time these commotions took place, was enjoying the pleasures of conviviality in Ireland, expressed in somewhat contemptuous terms his dissatisfaction at the want of arrangement and energy on the part of ministers. But this seemed to proceed from the failure of their plans rather than from any respect to his deceased queen. She was persecuted even to the last. In the course of the procession Sir Robert Wilson remonstrated with some soldiers on duty, and this humane interference deprived him of his commission; the directing civil magistrate, also, who consulted humanity in preference to his orders, was dismissed from office. It was unmanly to persecute the departed while in the land of the living; it was unworthy of manhood to carry resentment beyond the grave.