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.