It was one of the most painful royal deaths I’ve ever read about, dragged out over the course of
nearly two weeks and made even worse by some truly awful medical treatments which would
now be classed as torture and even murder, but what killed Queen Caroline? How did her
doctors’ incredibly misguided interference lead to her passing excrement out of her
body in a hideous way and how did her husband, George II, ensure that she had perhaps the most
romantic royal burial in British history? This is History Calling where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past and I’m going to give you all the answers, including a
peak inside the royal vault so you can see how George, Caroline and their family were buried.
Princess Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, often known simply as
Caroline of Ansbach, was born on 1 March 1683, the daughter of John Frederick,
Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, and his second wife, Princess Eleonore of Saxe-Eisenach.
Orphaned by the age of 13, she was raised by various family members and in 1705 she married
George Augustus, son of the Elector of Hanover and then third in line for the throne of England,
Wales, Scotland and Ireland (which didn’t become Great Britain and Ireland until 1707).
In 1714 Queen Anne Stuart died and Caroline’s father-in-law became George I. She and her husband
became the Prince and Princess of Wales and the family moved to England, though Caroline’s eldest
son, Frederick, had to stay behind in Hanover to represent the dynasty there. In 1727 her husband
ascended to the throne making her the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and the Electress
of Hanover. The couple had eight children who were born alive and it was the arrival of the
last of these, Princess Louisa, in 1724 which began Caroline’s slow descent towards death.
On the morning of 9 November 1737, Caroline, then aged 54, was at an event at the new library she
had commissioned in St James’s Park (it no longer exists unfortunately) when she began complaining
of stomach and bowel pain, which she put down to colic. She returned home, suffering from vomiting
and went to bed, but went out again at 2pm to host a drawing room, not wanting anyone to know
how ill she was. Within hours she had to return to bed though and was never seen in public again.
She became much worse, retching and suffering severe abdominal pains, to the point that she
could get no rest. Her attending doctor was a Dr Tesier but another, named Broxholme was soon
sent for and it was decided to give Caroline the disgusting sounding usquebaugh which she
soon threw up, followed by the equally dubious snake-root along with a cordial first invented by
Sir Walter Raleigh. Again, she threw them up. Nor could she keep down mint-water or something called
Daffy’s elixir (please don’t ask me what all these exotic sounding ‘medicines’ were by the way,
as I’m afraid I have no idea). With the Queen now suffering a fever, the old staple of bleeding was
employed and Caroline had 12 ounces of blood taken out of her. King George, who despite cheating
on his wife frequently during their marriage nevertheless loved her very much, stayed with her
that night, though his remaining was inconvenient to them both as neither could get any sleep.
The next morning, the 10 November, another 10 ounces of blood were taken but the Queen was
already sure she was dying, telling her daughter, Princess Caroline, who was also in failing health
at the time, ‘Poor Caroline! You are very ill too; we shall soon meet again in another place’.
She wasn’t wrong. Two more doctors, the famous Sir Hans Sloane who you see here and Dr Edward Hulse,
were brought in and the torture known as early modern medicine continued, with more bleedings as
well as blisters on her legs and aperients, the latter being intended to relieve constipation,
though it failed in Caroline’s case not least because she threw them up. By the 11th her fever
was down, but as Lord Hervey put it ‘the total stoppage and frequent vomitings still continued’.
The couple’s eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, who in the grand fashion of the
Hanoverians had a terrible relationship with his parents, now began to ask to see his mother,
but neither the King nor the Queen would hear of it. In fact Caroline remarked that Frederick
‘perhaps hopes I shall be fool enough to let him come, and give him the pleasure of seeing my last
breath go out of my body, by which means he would have the joy of knowing I was dead five minutes
sooner than he could know it on Pall Mall.’ She even told George that ‘if I should grow worse,
and be weak enough to talk of seeing him, I beg you, Sir, to conclude that I doat [sic] or rave’.
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It was only on 12th November that it emerged that Caroline was suffering from an old ailment,
one which her husband knew about but which she had sworn him to secrecy on.
Very much against her wishes, he confessed to her surgeon, Doctor John Ranby, that she had a
so-called ‘umbilical rupture’. This had emerged after the birth of Louisa 13 years earlier but
Caroline’s modesty had caused her to hide it and she had flatly refused to have it looked at in the
intervening years, despite her husband’s requests that she seek medical attention (though really,
given the state of medicine at the time, she might have been right not to let any
of the 18th century doctors near her). The surgeon was now able to feel it easily upon
examining her abdomen and, chiding her for concealing this information for so long,
immediately recommended another surgeon be called for a second opinion. In fact two more came,
a Doctor Shipton and the elderly Frenchman, Dr Paul Bussier. Bussier proposed immediate
surgery ‘to replace the protrusion’ which Ranby and Shipton thought was a poor idea.
Nevertheless, at 6pm that evening the surgery was performed. It was an unmitigated disaster.
The diary of Viscount Percival, later the Earl of Egmont, tells us that there was ‘an incision
immediately ordered where the swelling was, out of which came a great deal of stinking stuff’.
The doctors had cut into her bowel and to make matters worse, in the middle of the surgery,
for which Caroline was awake the entire time, Dr Bussier, who was in his 80s, set his wig on
fire from the candle he was holding and the Queen had to ask them to pause so that she could laugh.
By 4am the next morning, just ten hours after the surgery,
the wound was very painful and had already begun to ‘mortify’,
to use the language of the time. In other words, the flesh was dying off and going gangrenous.
The doctors knew their patient was lost. They declared right away that death would now be
imminent, though as we’ll see, Caroline held out for longer than the few hours that they expected.
She made her farewells to her husband and most of her children,
giving them instructions as to how to behave and returning her coronation ring to the King.
She also told him to remarry, but he refused instead telling her through tears that he would
have mistresses instead . Let’s assume that Caroline took that as a compliment.
The Queen then slept and when she awoke said she knew that the rest she had had was but a short
reprieve and that she would die. She believed that she would last until Wednesday though for
all the important things in her life (her birth, her marriage, the birth of her first child,
her coronation and her hearing of the death of George I) had happened on a Wednesday.
As she hadn’t died yet, the doctors began to backtrack on their earlier pronouncements,
cutting off some of the gangrenous material and saying she might live.
On Monday 14th one of the country’s leading politicians, Sir Robert Walpole,
came briefly to see her and she recommended her husband, children and the kingdom to his care.
She continued to be very ill, though her vomiting lessened but the protrusion in
her abdomen continued. George, though perhaps well meaning, frequently annoyed her by talking
to her in a loud voice and trying to get her to eat and drink many different things even
when the doctors and the Princesses had a page stuck to the curtains of Caroline’s
bed saying that she should only be spoken to when necessary and then only in a soft voice.
Despite her prediction, Wednesday came and went and Caroline still lived but on
Thursday 17th she began vomiting again and Lord Hervey’s memoirs tell us that
The running at the wound was in such immense quantities that it went all
through the quilts of the bed and flowed all over the floor. – Some ignorant people
about her who knew not from what cause this evacuation proceeded,
told the Queen they hoped this relief would do her good, to which the Queen replied very calmly,
she hoped so too, for that was all the evacuations she should ever have.
If you’re not sure what this means, it’s that as Caroline had been unable to have a bowel movement
since the onset of her illness her waste was now flowing out of the wound in her abdomen,
just as Percival had reported it doing on the day of the initial surgery. Still though, the doctors
continued to make incisions and the Queen, says Hervey ‘always submitted immediately, and suffered
them to cut and probe as deep and as long as they thought fit, with the utmost patience,
resignation, and resolution’. She even joked with Dr Ranby, who it was well known detested his wife,
that he would be happy if he could do the same to Mrs Ranby as he was doing to her.
George continued to be selfish, thoughtless and annoying, telling all who would listen how much
he loved Caroline and that she was the best of women, yet complaining to her when he was
in her room that she was shifting in the bed too much (this was because of how much
pain she was in) and that she would never get any sleep if she would not lie still.
He also continued to try to make her eat, which she did to please him,
only to throw the food up within half an hour. Her final few days would probably have been more
peaceful if only her husband could have learnt to hold his tongue and even their daughter Princess
Emily sometimes faked sleep so that she would not have to engage in conversation with him.
Over the next two days Caroline got weaker and weaker.
Viscount Percival tells us that on Friday 18th:
I went this morning again to Court and then found there was a great despondency,
though the Queen slept from four till seven: but the wound or incision formerly mentioned
to be made, cast forth so great a quantity of corruption that the physician apprehends
there is a greater abscess within than they imagined and that corruption enlarges itself,
and will continue to do so till it gains a vital part.
This account shows how completely misunderstood Caroline’s condition was. There was no abscess.
As Lucy Worsely has written (and I’ll leave her blog post on this linked below for you),
what the doctors hadn’t appreciated initially was that Caroline’s ‘umbilical hernia’ as she called
it, was actually a piece of her bowel ‘poking out through the wall of her stomach. … The
doctors should really have pushed the bowel back inside and sewn up the hole. Instead
they cut it off. … If the intestine had been pushed back inside and the rupture sealed up,
all may have been well. Cutting the bowel, though, destroyed Caroline’s
digestive system, and with it all hope of her recovery.’ The end was now very close.
On 19 November Lord Percy was back at court where he was told ‘she rested not well some
part of the night, when more than a chamber pot full of corruption came out of the wound,
after which about five o’clock this morning she slept, and so continued till nine’.
At 10 or 11pm on 20 November (sources differ) the end came. Lord Hervey’s memoirs (which
talk about him in the third person) give the following account of her last moments:
The King being in bed and asleep on the floor at the feet of the Queen’s bed, and the Princess
Emily in a couch-bed in a corner of the room – the Queen began to rattle in the throat;
and Mrs. Purcel giving the alarm that she was expiring, all in the room started up.
Princess Caroline was sent for, and Lord Hervey, but before the last arrived the Queen was just
dead. All she said before she died, ‘I have now got an asthma. Open the window’. Then she said,
‘Pray.’ Upon which the Princess Emily began to read some prayers,
of which she scarce repeated ten words before the Queen expired.
George, despite all his cheating on Caroline, was heartbroken. He ordered the country into full
mourning for his wife and arranged a unique and really quite moving and romantic burial for her.
She was buried in a new vault in the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey. It lies beneath the
central aisle, directly in front of the huge tomb monument to King Henry and his wife, Elizabeth of
York. George further directed that Caroline’s coffin should be placed in the large marble
sarcophagus you see here in this old drawing of the inside of the vault and that the coffin should
be constructed in such a way that one side of it could be removed once it was in the sarcophagus.
This was so that George’s own coffin could be set next to it when he died
and its side removed too, thus allowing their remains to mingle together forever.
She was buried according to his instructions on 17 December though I’m not sure if the side
of the coffin was removed then, or later. I really hope it was much later though,
for we have a strange story about George’s behaviour in the weeks after the Queen’s
burial which would be all the more gruesome if the side of the coffin was already open.
On 10 January 1738, Lord Wentworth wrote to the Earl of Strafford that:
A Saturday night between one and two a clock the King waked out of a dream very uneasy and
order’d the vault where the Queen is to be broke open immetiatly [sic] and to have the
marble coffin also open’d, and went in a hackney chair thro’ the horse guards to Westminster Abbey,
and went down into the vault and stood and consider’d her coffin very attentively a
good while and then went back again to bed. I think it the strangest thing that could be,
for it was impossible for the King to think she was not there.
Let’s hope that the coffin was still intact at this time and George wasn’t looking directly
at the body, or its wrappings, six weeks after Caroline had expired.
Presumably he had had a nightmare that her body was gone, but it was not. She was there then just
as she still is now and in 1760 George finally joined her again forever, with his unusual wishes
regarding his burial followed to the letter. He was interred next to his wife in the sarcophagus
and the side of his coffin was removed. When the vault had to be opened in 1837 a Mr H.H. Milman,
who was the Prebendary of Westminster, reported seeing the two coffin lids leaning against the
wall just where they had been left after the King’s orders had been carried out. Of course
as romantic as this was for George and Caroline, let’s spare a thought for the men who had to put
the monarch’s body into the sarcophagus, open up the side of his coffin and either see the Queen’s
rotting corpse in an open coffin right next to him or (even worse) perform the task of opening
up the side of her coffin at that stage, then seeing the body. Not a pleasant task!
Many of the couple’s children would also be placed in the vault as you can see by this fantastic,
annotated floor plan of the coffins it contains. They include the infant Prince George, who had
died in 1718, the hated Prince Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died in 1751 without ever acceding
to the throne, Princess Caroline, who died in 1757 (so she lasted longer than her mother had
expected), Prince William, Duke of Cumberland who expired in 1765 and Princess Amelia who died in
1786 (Amelia is another name for Princess Emily, with Emily being what the primary sources I cited
earlier called her). There are other Hanoverians in there too, such as Frederick’s wife, Princess
Augusta of Wales and some of their children and grandchildren, the grandchildren being the
offspring of George III and his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. If you’d like to know more
about them, see my video on Charlotte, which I’ll leave linked onscreen and below for you.
Above ground there is hardly any indication that any of them are there. All that exists to show the
burial place of so many Hanoverians are a series of very simple and often very faded grave markers,
laid into the floor. With your attention taken up by the epic Tudor memorial in front of you,
you could walk over these stones without even noticing them.
And so we come to the end of the story of the awful death, yet surprisingly touching
burial of Queen Caroline. If you’re in the mood for some more royal history,
try one of these videos next. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.