Morbid Fact Du Jour For February 1, 2011

And the final episode of the death of Caroline of Anspach:

Today’s Inconsolable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

As Caroline of Anspach lay dying from ruptured bowels, her son, Frederick, was refused admittance to tender his goodbyes. Initially Caroline had wondered whether she would be “fool enough to let him come and give him the pleasure of seeing my last breath go out of my body”, but ultimately she decided against the idea. “At least,” she said of her son, “I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed – I shall never see that monster again.”

At Caroline’s passing, the widower, King George II, loudly lamented his loss. One morning he called for a portrait of Caroline to be propped on a chair at the foot of his bed. For two hours he gazed on the features of the dead queen. But mere likenesses in oils failed to expiate his grief. For almost a month Caroline lay unburied in her coffin at St. James’s Place, visited frequently by her inconsolable husband. Even after she had been deposited in the vaults of Westminster Abbey, the king could not bear to be parted from her – as was attested to in a letter written by Lord Wenwoth: “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.”

After George II’s own death, caused by a head injury suffered by falling into a bureau in his bathroom, his final wish that his coffin be laid next to that of his wife and the adjacent panels be removed in order that their bones might lie together, was carried out.

Culled from: Death: A History Of Man’s Obsessions and Fears