The remainder of the ceremonial was long and tedious, and it was quite dusk before the procession returned to the Hall. In the meantime, the champion’s horse was champing his bit with great impatience, as became a horse of his dignity. This gallant grey charger was no other than that which bore the sacred majesty of George II. through the dangers of the great and bloody day at Dettingen. The veteran steed was now to be the leader in the equestrian spectacle at the banquet of that monarch’s successor.
Although there was ample time for the completion of everything necessary to the coronation of George and Charlotte, the earl-marshal forgot some very indispensable items; among others, the sword of state, the state-banquet chairs for the King and Queen, and the canopy. It was lucky that the crown had not been forgotten too. As it was, they had to borrow the ceremonial sword of the Lord Mayor, and workmen built a canopy amid the scenic splendours of Westminster Hall. These mistakes delayed the procession till noon.
It was dark when the procession returned to the Hall; and as the illuminating of the latter was deferred till the King and Queen had taken their places, the cortège had very much the appearance of a funeral procession, nothing being discernible but the plumes of the Knights of the Bath, which seemed the hearse. There were less dignified incidents than these in the course of the day’s proceedings; the least dignified was an awkward rencounter between the Queen herself and the Duke of Newcastle, behind the scenes. Walpole says that ‘some of the procession were dressed over night, slept in arm chairs, and were waked if they tumbled on their heads.’ Noticing some of the ladies present, the same writer adds: ‘I carried my Lady Townshend, Lady Hertford, Lady Anne Conolly, my Lady Hervey, and Mrs. Clive to my deputy’s house at the gate of Westminster Hall. My Lady Townshend said she should be very glad to see a coronation, as she never had seen one. “Why,” said I, “madam, you walked at the last.” “Yes, child,” said she, “but I saw nothing of it. I only looked to see who looked at me.” The Duchess of Queensberry walked; her affectation that day was to do nothing preposterous. Lord Chesterfield was not present either in Abbey or Hall; for, as he said of the ceremony, he was “not alive enough to march, nor dead enough to walk at it.”’
The scene in the banqueting-hall is further described by Grey and also by Walpole. Grey says of the scene in Westminster Hall: ‘The instant the Queen’s canopy entered fire was given to all the lustres at once by trains of prepared flax that reached from one to the other. To me it seemed an interval of not half a minute before the whole was in a blaze of splendour ... and the most magnificent spectacle ever beheld remained. The King, bowing to the lords as he passed, with his crown on his head and the sceptre and orb in his hands, took his place with great majesty and grace. So did the Queen, with her crown, sceptre, and rod. Then supper was served on gold plate. The Earl Talbot, Duke of Bedford, and Earl of Effingham, in their robes, all three on horseback, prancing and curvetting like the hobby-horses in the “Rehearsal,” ushered in the courses to the foot of the hautpas. Between the courses the champion performed his part with applause.’ ‘All the wines of Bordeaux,’ Walpole writes to George Montagu, ‘and all the fumes of Irish brains cannot make a town so drunk as a royal wedding and a coronation. I am going to let London cool, and will not venture into it again this fortnight. Oh, the buzz, the prattle, the crowds, the noise, the hurry! Nay, people are so little come to their senses, that, though the coronation was but the day before yesterday, the Duke of Devonshire had forty messages yesterday, desiring admissions for a ball that they fancied was to be at court last night. People had sat up a night and a day, and yet wanted to see a dance! If I was to entitle ages, I would call this “the century of crowds.” For the coronation, if a puppet-show could be worth a million, that is. The multitudes, balconies, guards, and processions made Palace Yard the liveliest spectacle in the world: the ball was most glorious. The blaze of lights, the richness and variety of habits, the ceremonial, the bunches of peers and peeresses, frequent and full, were as awful as a pageant can be; and yet, for the King’s sake and my own, I never wish to see another; nor am impatient to have my Lord Effingham’s promise fulfilled. The King complained that so few precedents were kept of their proceedings. Lord Effingham vowed the earl-marshal’s office had been strangely neglected, but he had taken such care for the future that the next coronation would be regulated in the most exact manner imaginable. The number of peers and peeresses present was not very great; some of the latter, with no excuse in the world, appeared in Lord Lincoln’s gallery, and even walked about the hall indecently in the intervals of the procession. My Lady Harrington, covered with all the diamonds she could borrow, hire, or seize, and with the air of Roxana, was the finest figure at a distance. She complained to George Selwyn that she was to walk with Lady Portsmouth, who would have a wig and a stick. “Pho!” said he, “you will only look as if you were taken up by the constable.” She told this everywhere, thinking that the reflection was on my Lady Portsmouth! Lady Pembroke alone, at the head of the countesses, was the picture of majestic modesty. The Duchess of Richmond as pretty as nature and dress, with no pains of her own, could make her. Lady Spencer, Lady Sutherland, and Lady Northampton, very pretty figures. Lady Kildare, still beauty itself, if not a little too large. The ancient peeresses were by no means the worst party. Lady Westmoreland still handsome, and with more dignity than all. The Duchess of Queensberry looked well, though her locks are milk-white. Lady Albemarle very genteel; nay, the middle age had some good representatives in Lady Holdernesse, Lady Rochford, and Lady Strafford, the perfectest little figure of all. My Lady Suffolk ordered her robes, and I dressed part of her head, as I made some of my Lord Hertford’s dress, for you know no profession comes amiss to me, from a tribune of the people to a habit-maker. Do not imagine that there were not figures as excellent on the other side. Old Exeter, who told the King he was the handsomest man she ever saw; old Effingham, and Lady Say and Sele, with her hair powdered and her tresses black, were an excellent contrast to the handsome. Lord B. put on rouge upon his wife and the Duchess of Bedford in the Painted Chamber; the Duchess of Queensberry told me of the latter, that she looked like an orange peach, half red and half yellow. The coronets of the peers and their robes disguised them strangely. It required all the beauty of the Dukes of Richmond and Marlborough to make them noticed. One there was, though of another species, the noblest figure I ever saw, the high constable of Scotland, Lord Errol: as one saw him in a space capable of containing him, one admired him. At the wedding, dressed in tissue, he looked like one of the giants at Guildhall, new gilt. It added to the energy of his person that one considered him as acting so considerable a part in that very hall where a few years ago one saw his father, Lord Kilmarnock, condemned to the block. The champion acted his part admirably, and dashed down his gauntlet with proud defiance. His associates, Lord Effingham, Lord Talbot, and the Duke of Bedford, were woeful. Lord Talbot piqued himself on backing his horse down the Hall, and not turning its rump towards the King; but he had taken such pains to dress it to that duty that it entered backwards; and at his retreat, the spectators clapped—a terrible indecorum, but suitable to such Bartholomew Fair doings. He had twenty démêlés, and came off none creditably. He had taken away the table of the Knights of the Bath, and was forced to admit two in their old place, and dine the other at the Court of Requests. Sir William Stanhope said, “We are ill-treated, for some of us are gentlemen.” Beckford told the earl it was hard to refuse a table to the City of London, whom it would cost ten thousand pounds to banquet the King, and that his lordship would repent it if they had not a table in the hall; they had. To the barons of the Cinque Ports, who made the same complaint, he said, “If you come to me as lord-steward, I tell you it is impossible; if as Lord Talbot, I am a match for any of you;” and then he said to Lord Bute, “If I were a minister, thus would I talk to France, to Spain, to the Dutch; none of your half-measures.”’
With all the solemnity, there was some riot. A passage from a letter written by one James Heming (quoted in ‘Notes and Queries,’ 2nd S., V. II., p. 109) says: ‘Our friend Harry, who was upon the scaffold at the return of the procession, closed in with the rear; at the expense of half a guinea was admitted into the Hall; got brimful of his Majesty’s claret, and in the universal plunder, brought off the glass her Majesty drank in, which is placed in the beaufet as a valuable curiosity.’ There was long a tradition current, that among the spectators at the great ceremony in the Hall was no less a person than the Young Pretender, who was said to have been there incognito, and not without some hope of seeing the gauntlet, defiantly thrown down by the champion, taken up by some bold adherent of his cause. Indeed, it is further reported that preparation had been made for such an attempt, but that (fortunately) it accidentally failed. The Pretender, so runs the legend, was recognised by a nobleman, who, standing near him, whispered in his ear that he was the last person anybody would expect to find there. ‘I am here simply out of curiosity,’ was the answer of the wanderer; ‘but I assure you that the man who is the object of all this pomp and magnificence is the person in the world whom I least envy.’ To complete the chain of reports, it may be further noticed that Charles Edward was said to have abjured Romanism, in the new church in the Strand, in the year 1754.
The night after the coronation there was an unusually grand ball at court. The Queen’s bride’s-maids danced in the white bodiced coats they had worn at the wedding. The Duke of Ancaster was resplendent in the dress which the King had worn the whole of the day before at the coronation, and which he had graciously ordered to be presented to the duke, whose wife was the Queen’s mistress of the robes! The King and Queen retired at eleven o’clock; not an early hour for the period.
There was great gaiety in town generally at this period. The young Queen announced that she would attend the opera once a week—that seemed dissipation enough for her, who had been educated with some strictness in the quietest and smallest of German courts. The weekly attendance of royalty is thus commented upon by Walpole: ‘It is a fresh disaster to our box, where we have lived so harmoniously for three years. We can get no alternative but that over Miss Chudleigh’s; and Lord Strafford and Lady Mary Coke will not subscribe unless we can. The Duke of Devonshire and I are negotiating with all our art to keep our party together. The crowds at the opera and play when the King and Queen go are a little greater than what I remember. The late royalties went to the Haymarket when it was the fashion to frequent the other opera in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields. Lord Chesterfield one night came into the latter, and was asked if he had been at the other house? “Yes,” said he, “but there was nobody but the King and Queen; and as I thought they might be talking business, I came away.”’
The theatres, of course, adopted the usual fashion of reproducing the ceremony of the coronation on the stage. Garrick, considering that he was a man of taste, displayed great tastelessness in his conduct on this occasion. After ‘Henry VIII.,’ in which Bensley played the King, Havard acted Wolsey, and Yates—what was so long played as a comic part—Gardiner, and in which Mrs. Pritchard played the Queen, and Mrs. Yates Anne Boleyn, a strange representation of the ceremonial was presented to the public. Garrick, it is said, knowing that Rich would spare no expense in producing the spectacle at the other house, and fearing the cost of competition with a man than whom the stage never again saw one so clever in getting up scenic effects till it possessed Farley, contented himself with the old, mean, and dirty dresses which had figured in the stage coronation of George II. and Caroline. The most curious incident of Garrick’s show was, that by throwing down the wall behind the stage, he really opened the latter into Drury Lane itself, where a monster bonfire was burning and a mob huzzaing about it. The police authorities did not interfere, and the absurd representation was continued for six or seven weeks, ‘till the indignation of the public,’ says Davis, ‘put a stop to it, to the great comfort of the performers, who walked in the procession, and who were seized with colds, rheumatism, and swelled faces, from the suffocation of the smoke and the raw air from the open street.’ Their Majesties did not witness the representation of the coronation at either house. Their first visit was paid to Drury Lane, when the Queen commanded the piece to be played, and her selection was one that had some wit in it. The young bride chose, ‘Rule a Wife and have a Wife.’ The royal visit took place on the 26th of November.
At Covent Garden ‘Henry the Fifth,’ with the coronation, was acted twenty-six times; and ‘Richard the Third,’ with the same pageant, was played fourteen times. That exquisite hussey, Mrs. Bellamy, walked in the procession as the representative of the Queen. Their Majesties paid their first visit in state, on the 7th of January 1762. The King, with some recollection, probably, of his consort’s ‘bespeak’ at Drury Lane, commanded the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor.’ So that in this respect the new reign commenced merrily enough. It had its bons mots. When some persons expressed surprise at the Queen having named Lady Northumberland one of the ladies of her bedchamber, Lady Townshend said, ‘Quite right! the Queen knows no English. Lady Northumberland will teach her the vulgar tongue!’