It was one of the MOST PAINFUL ROYAL DEATHS in British history, but what killed Queen Caroline, who was the wife of George II and how did her husband ensure that she had perhaps the most romantic royal burial in English history? In this week’s video from History Calling on Hanoverian history, we find out.
Who was Queen Caroline? Born in 1683 as Princess Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, in 1705 she married the future George II, who would become King of Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover in 1727. Together they had eight children. The death of Queen Caroline occurred on 20 November 1737 and she’s one of the many royal consorts who’s buried in Westminster Abbey. Far from dying peacefully in her sleep though, she only expired after a long and incredibly painful illness brought on by a hernia which had emerged after her final living child was born but which she had kept secret. Her condition was exacerbated by some truly awful medical treatments, including an operation performed while she was awake which seems to have ruptured her intestines and would nowadays be considered torture and even murder. It led to her excrement pouring out of her body through the wound and was a hideous way to die. Despite this though, it may surprise you to hear that she was laughing during the procedure thanks to the ineptitude of her doctors.
Her distraught husband had a new vault built under the chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey and a large marble sarcophagus made so that when the time came his coffin could be set into it next to his Queen’s. He then did something even more unusual; he ordered that the side of Caroline’s coffin be removed once she was in place so that we he died and was interred next to her, the same could be done to his, thus allowing their bones and eventually dust to mingle for eternity. When George II died in 1760, twenty-three years after his consort, that is exactly what happened and reports from the following century spoke of the coffin lids propped up next to the grave.
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