Death aim’d his dart, and struck the mitre there.
Poor Queen Adelaide! A wish could save her from some of the empty pomps and vanities that linger about the open grave, but nothing could save her from the villainous poetasters. All the rhymers who rung metrical knells at her death deserved the fate, and for like reasons, invoked in Julius Cæsar on the so-called poet who made ‘bad verses.’
The preachers, if honest chronicling is to be observed, did not on this occasion very much excel the poets. Very ‘tolerable’ indeed, and not at all to be endured, were most of the funeral sermons which have come under my notice. One clergyman, who had been the Queen’s chaplain too, and who had composed a funeral sermon on William IV. reproduced not merely the substance, but in many parts, identical passages from the discourse on the dead King, and made them do duty in illustrating the demise of that sovereign’s royal widow. Others were illogical, or were painfully simple or amusingly trite. In one I find an intimation that, ‘after deducting the more needful expenses of her household, she gave away all she had, and died poor;’ which seems an inevitable consequence of such liberality. None of these who took a dead Queen for the subject of a lesson on vanity, or for an example to be followed, wore the mantle of a Bossuet—grand and instructive when consigning La Vallière to the cloister, or Henrietta of Orleans to a tomb. They might at least have found something suggestive in the sermon on the latter occasion, by the ‘Eagle of Meaux,’ where he exclaims, after apt reflection on birth, rank, and their responsibilities: ‘No! after what we have just seen, we must feel that health exists only in name, life is a dream, glory a deception, favours and pleasures dangerous amusements, everything about us vanity. She was as gentle towards death as she had been to all the world.... She will sleep with the great ones of the earth, with princes and kings, whose power is at an end, amongst whom there is hardly room to be found, so closely do they lie together, and so prompt is death to fill the vacant places. Can we build our hopes on ruins such as these?’
From beyond sea there did come echoes something like these, and fitting homage to the virtues of the deceased lady was rendered from many a church pulpit among a foreign people. In another hemisphere, at the Cape of Good Hope, a funeral sermon was preached in St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, on the 24th February, 1850, by the Rev. W. A. Newman, at that time Senior Colonial Chaplain and Rural Dean, in which that learned and eloquent divine rendered a graceful tribute to the memory of the deceased Queen, of which the following paragraph is a portion:—‘Of this excellent lady’s large charities I can speak from evidence, and can, therefore, speak with a full heart. I have lived near to the neighbourhood where her less public bounty diffused itself. I know that the sick-room of the poor has been visited by her in person; I know that from her own table a portion has been sent, to call forth the coy appetite of disease; and I know that wherever she went many a heartfelt God bless her would follow.’
Such was Queen Adelaide, some seven years Queen Consort of Great Britain; a lady who will be remembered, if not as a great Queen, yet as one of the truly good women who have shared with a King regnant the throne of these islands—one who lived down calumny, and who, being dead, is remembered with respect and affection.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Lord Holland’s ‘Memoirs of the Whig Party.’
[2] Miss Burney’s Diary.
[3] Miss Burney’s Diary.
[4] Miss Burney’s Diary.