The King was very morbid in his grief, and much given to dwelling upon the material aspect of death. He was very superstitious and a firm believer in ghouls and vampires. Lord Wentworth gives an illustration of this in a letter he wrote to his father, Lord Strafford, shortly after the Queen’s funeral. “Saturday night, between one and two o’clock, the King waked out of a dream very uneasy, and ordered the vault, where the Queen is, to be broken open immediately, and have the coffin also opened; and went in a hackney chair through the Horse Guards to Westminster Abbey, and back again to bed. I think it is the strangest thing that could be.” In a subsequent letter he refers to it again: “The story about the King was true, for Mr. Wallop heard of one who saw him go through the Horse Guards on Saturday night with ten footmen before the chair. They went afterwards to Westminster Abbey.”
Thirty-three years later George the Second was buried by his Queen’s side, and as a last proof of his devotion he left orders that one side of her coffin should be removed, and one side of his taken away, so that their bones should mingle, and in death be not divided.[132]
Caroline was widely mourned by all classes of her husband’s subjects. Even those disaffected to the House of Hanover admitted the high qualities of the Queen, and the Jacobites tempered their judgment, when they remembered that she had always been on the side of mercy. Only from the Prince of Wales’s household and from those who supported him came any discordant note, and it must be admitted that some of these were very discordant indeed. In the eighteenth century personal and political hatreds were carried beyond the grave, and some of the epigrams and mock epitaphs composed by the Queen’s enemies after her death form anything but pleasant reading. The fact that she did not see the Prince of Wales during her last illness was seized upon as a pretext for attacking her memory.
And unforgiving, unforgiven dies!
cried Chesterfield with bitter sarcasm, while Pope with more subtle irony wrote:—
Hang the sad verse on Carolina’s urn,
And hail her passage to the realms of rest.
All parts perform’d, and all her children blest!
But these outbursts were overwhelmed in the spontaneous tribute of affection and respect paid to the dead Queen on all sides. Her loss was felt to be a national calamity. “The Lord hath taken away His anointed with a stroke,” cried a preacher, “the breath of our nostrils is taken away. The great princess is no more under whose shadow we said we should be safe, and promised ourselves lasting peace—she, whom future generations will know as Caroline the Illustrious.”[133] And indeed the Queen’s pre-eminent qualities fit her for no lesser epithet. Caroline’s character was formed on bold and generous lines, and her defects only served to bring into stronger relief the purity of her life, the loftiness of her motives and the excellence of her wisdom. She was a good hater but a true friend, patient under suffering, strong in adversity, fond of power, yet using it always for the good of others. In the words which Frederick the Great applied to her early mentor the Queen of Prussia, “She had a great soul”.