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.