HE minute details of the funeral of Mary Stuart, at Westminster Abbey, prove that it was conducted on the same scale and with the same ceremonies as the one which preceded it by many years at Peterborough. King James, her son, was present, and shortly afterwards the sumptuous monument which we still admire marked the place where her mutilated remains, translated from Peterborough, found a permanent place of rest.
The great changes in religion which occurred at the time of the Reformation, although they took much longer to permeate the habits and customs of the people than is usually imagined, nevertheless were so radical, that of the ancient ritual little soon remained, and the beautiful funeral service of the Church of England, which is so full of faith and hope, and mainly selected from passages of Holy Scripture adapted to the requirements of a religion which abolished belief in an intermediary state, and therefore in the necessity of prayers for the dead, was introduced, and little by little the pompous ceremonies of the Roman Church were forgotten. The lying-in-state of the corpse, for instance, which up to the close of the reign of Mary was general, even with poor people, was now only in use among those of the very highest rank. The increase in the use of carriages, too, and of course the abolition of the monastic orders and brotherhoods, diminished the splendour of the street processions which used to follow the bier. Still, much that was quaint remained in fashion, and it is only, as already said, a few years since that ladies ceased wearing a scarf and hood of black silk, and gentlemen "weepers" on their hats and arms, which were black or white according to the sex of the deceased. In Norfolk, until the end of the first quarter of the present century, it was the custom to give the mourners at a funeral black gloves, scarves, and bunches of herbs. Indeed, it is but a short time since a very old lady told me that so rich, broad, and beautiful was the silk of the scarves presented to each lady at a funeral, when she was a girl, that ladies were wont to keep the pieces by them until they were sufficient in number to form a dress. A bill of the funeral expenses of a very rich gentleman who died at Brandon Hall, in Norfolk, early in this century,—Mr. Denn, of Norwich,—and who left over half a million of money, enables us to form some idea of the expense to which our grandfathers of the upper class were put in order to be buried with what they considered proper respect. It would seem that in those days the hearse and funeral carriages had to be hired from London, and they took three days to perform the journey from the metropolis—a distance of about three hours by rail. No fewer than 40 persons figure as accompanying these vehicles, and as they had to be put up at inns along the road, going both to and from London to Brandon Hall, their expenses were £180. The hire of horses and carriages was £106, and what with the distribution of loaves to the poor at the grave, and the expense of bringing relatives from far parts of the country, and of providing them with silk scarves, gloves, etc., and the housing and entertaining of them all, the worthy Mr. Denn's funeral cost his survivors not less than £775.
Fig. 37.—Interment in a Church in the first quarter of the 18th Century.—From Picard's great work on the Religions of all Nations.
In Picard, there is a very beautiful engraving by Schley, representing a funeral procession in 1735, entering the church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. It occurs by night, and a number of pages in black velvet walk in it, carrying lighted three-branched silver candlesticks. It seems that until 1775 women in England only attended the funerals of their own sex, and that men in the same manner only followed men to the grave. Possibly as a disinfectant against the plague, at all English funerals a branch of rosemary was handed to all who attended, which they threw into the open grave. This fashion endured, to the writer's knowledge, in Norfolk up to 1856.
The French Revolution cannot be described as an unmitigated blessing—far from it; but it certainly did away with many superstitious practices, and shed a flood of light upon civilisation. Before that event it was the universal custom throughout Europe to bury in churches, a practice which was most detrimental to health. By one of the earliest decrees passed by the Convention of Paris, 1794, intramural interments were abolished, although, to be sure, cemeteries already existed of considerable extent, possibly suggested by those which for ages the Mahometans have used in all the principal cities of Asia and Asiatic Europe. That of Père la Chaise, so called after the confessor of Madame de Maintenon, who founded it, is one of the earliest. With the counter-Reformation, as the movement is called in history, the ceremonial of the Roman Church became, on the Continent, even more elaborate than heretofore, and nothing can be imagined more theatrically splendid than the church decorations on occasions of funerals of eminent personages.
