Sir and dear Brother,
I have just time enough to write you these few lines from England. If patriotism consists in the love of our country, what I feel now at the sight of that element which, in a few hours, shall convey me far from this happy land, gives me a just claim to that virtue. Perhaps you men, who boast of more fortitude, call this sensibility weakness, as you would be ashamed to play the woman on such an occasion; but, in wishing you all the temporal felicity this life can afford, I confess all the philosophy I am mistress of cannot hinder me from concluding, with tears in my eyes,
Sir, and dear brother,
Your most affectionate sister,
Caroline.
On the next morning, October 3, her Majesty embarked at half-past eleven, and her sobbing heart found at least some relief and comfort in a flood of tears. Of this circumstance an eye-witness remarks: "The tears of her Majesty, on parting from the dear country in which she drew her first breath, might have inspired in those who beheld them gloomy forebodings as to the issue of the voyage she was about to undertake." In another account we read how the queen was dressed in bloom colour with white flowers. Wherever she passed, the earnest wishes of the people were for her health, and praying to God to preserve her from the perils of the sea. A gentle melancholy at times seemed to affect her on account of leaving her family and the place of her birth; but, upon the whole, she carried an air of serenity and majesty which exceedingly moved every one that beheld her. As Mrs. Gillespie Smyth justly remarks,[19] "how irresistibly do these details of the contemporary chronicler, in the quaint language of the times—the bloom-coloured dress and so on, suggest to those acquainted with the sad sequel the idea of an unconscious victim proceeding to her doom!"
The very sea seemed reluctant to surrender its lovely burden, for it was not till the 9th, a little before nine o'clock in the morning, that the queen safely landed at Rotterdam. Thence she set out for Utrecht, in the Prince of Orange's yacht. The Prince of Orange, the Prince and Princesses of Nassau Weilburg, and Prince Louis of Brunswick, received her Majesty on her landing, and conducted her to the apartments in the Admiralty House, which the magistrates of Rotterdam had fixed upon as the most convenient for her Majesty to arrive at, and where she was pleased to accept the compliments of the regency of that city. The Princess of Weilburg accompanied the queen through the town to her yacht, amidst the acclamations of the people, where the Prince of Orange again received her Majesty, and took leave.
Her Majesty travelled viâ Osnabrück, Lingen, and Utrecht to Harburg, and, on October 18, reached Altona, where she was welcomed by the viceroy of the duchies, Baron von Dehn, in the name of her consort. The joy with which she was received was almost indescribable. The bridge prepared for her royal reception was covered with scarlet cloth, on one side of which were ranged the ladies, and on the other the men, and at the end were two rows of young women, dressed in white, who strewed flowers before her Majesty as she approached. "The illuminations were inconceivable," the chronicler, lost for language, concludes. On the 22nd she set out for Copenhagen with Baron von Dehn.
In England the marriage was accompanied by the usual loyal addresses, which require no special comment, except in the case of that presented by the city of London, in which Mr. Recorder alludes to the auspicious marriage with that great "potentate" the King of Denmark, which leads to the notion that Englishmen must either have had a very poor opinion of their own country, or else could afford to be generous when referring to that tight little kingdom of Denmark. Another remarkable fact for the verse-writing century is, that I do not find a single epithalamium or flourish of poetical trumpets in honour of the marriage. Even loyal Mr. Whitehead, who earned his sack most honestly, and neglected no opportunity to give his Pegasus a canter, found no inspiration in the royal marriage.
At this point in Caroline Matilda's life I will leave her for a while, in order to introduce the reader to the other principal actors in the strange eventful drama of her life. We have seen how she was transported at once from the bosom of a happy private family to the morally aid physically frozen regions of the north. Born after the early and sudden demise of her father, this posthumous pledge of conjugal affection must have grown closely to the widowed mother's heart, while at the same time we can fully understand how genial must have been the atmosphere in which the natural talents and acquired accomplishments of the youngest of a large and happy family were previously developed. She left her home without the slightest acquaintance with the external world, "as unprepared to encounter its stern realities as some tender exotic, from her favourite summer abode at Kew, would have been to meet the blasts of the climate to which she was transplanted."[20]