It was the will of a Queen, but it stood for nothing in the eye of the law. The endorsement was brought under notice of the Prerogative Court; the Judge, Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, declared it to be of no effect. It was a mere unattested memorandum, and he pronounced, as the legal phrase is, for the original will. Of greater interest is the subjoined document, which pleasantly contrasts with the wills of many of her lady predecessors, whose minds were engaged on the disposal of their state beds, their mantles, and their jewellery, to the exclusion of all other subjects. Thus wrote the dying Queen Adelaide:—
‘I die in all humility, knowing well that we are all alike before the throne of God; and I request, therefore, that my mortal remains be conveyed to the grave without any pomp or state. They are to be removed to St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where I request to have as private and quiet a funeral as possible. I particularly desire not to be laid out in state, and the funeral to take place by daylight; no procession; the coffin to be carried by sailors to the chapel. All those of my friends and relations, to a limited number, who wish to attend may do so. My nephew, Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar, Lords Howe and Denbigh, the Hon. William Ashley, Mr. Wood, Sir Andrew Barnard, and Sir D. Davies, with my dressers, and those of my ladies who may wish to attend. I die in peace, and wish to be carried to the tomb in peace, and far from the vanities and pomp of this world. I request not to be dissected nor embalmed, and desire to give as little trouble as possible.
‘ADELAIDE R.’
The end soon came, and it was met with dignity. On the 22nd of November 1849, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the Dowager Queen for the last time. On the last day of the month she calmly passed away. The above document was then produced, and it rendered kings-of-arms, heralds, gold sticks, and upholsterers powerless to exercise their absurd dignity in connection with death when so intelligible and sensible a protest as the above was in existence. Accordingly, on a fine December morning of 1849, there issued from the gates of Bentley Priory an ordinary hearse with a pall emblazoned with the Queen’s arms, preceded by three mourning coaches. A scanty escort of cavalry accompanied them, more for use than show, their office being to see that no obstruction impeded the funeral march from Stanmore to Windsor. On its way the attitude of the spectators exhibited more of sympathy than curiosity.
The Harrow boys turned out in testimony of respect, and the country people at large looked like mourners, wearing more or less, but wearing some, outward manifestation of sorrow.
The Queen’s body reached the Chapel at Windsor at one o’clock. In the south aisle, close to the porch, there had been standing, grouped together, silent and motionless, a group of seamen,—grave, bronzed, athletic sailors. Their demeanour showed them worthy of the office which the now dead Queen had asked at their hands. When all the royal, and great, and noble personages were in their respective places—while some indispensable officials effected a little more of their foolish calling in the presence of death than Queen Adelaide herself would have sanctioned—while princes, peers, and prelates, ladies-in-waiting, clergy, and choristers, proceeded passively or actively with their parts in the ceremony of the day—then those ten sailors advanced to accomplish the duty assigned them, and, standing by the platform on which the body was placed, gently propelled it to a position over the subterranean passage into which it was lowered, after one of the simplest services that was ever said or sung for departed Queen had been accomplished—most simple, save when Garter stepped forward to announce, what all men knew, that it ‘had pleased Almighty God to take out of this life to His divine mercy’ the departed Queen; and to assert, what that royal lady would assuredly have gainsaid, that she was a ‘Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Excellent Princess.’ With this, and one or two other formalities of that pomp and state from which she had asked to be spared, Queen Adelaide passed to the tomb—a tomb capacious enough to contain whole generations of kings and queens, princes and princesses yet unborn.
This event was followed by an unusual amount of execrable elegiac verse, which was powerless, however, to throw ridicule on what it affected to solemnize. It was painful to read an inconceivable amount of this trash, which, intended to be serious, was often irresistibly comic. Out of the reams written in professed honour of a most exemplary Queen there was not an appropriate line worth citing. One sample of the solemnly absurd Pegasuses set restive on this occasion will assuredly satisfy curiosity. The writer affects to see at the royal funeral the ghosts of departed great ones, who assemble to do visionary homage to their new sister in death. Among them is the incautious Bishop who died from the effects of a cold caught at the funeral of the Duke of York:—
Lo! see the shade of a prelate pass by
Who came to a night-burial to die;
Standing too long expos’d to the chill air,