With the funerals of George I and his wife in Germany, there was no royal funeral in Britain after 1714 before the death of Queen Caroline in 1737. Her funeral and then that of her husband, King George II, were elaborate ceremonies with prominent orchestral anthems. The outstanding programme of music at these funerals was all the more enhanced by the low-key funeral of their son, the Prince of Wales, in 1751. In analogy to the description of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century coronations as ‘concert coronations’, the royal couple's musically lavish obsequies could be described as ‘concert funerals’.

Queen Caroline, 1737

The funeral of Queen Caroline has received much attention from music scholars, as it was for this occasion that George Frideric Handel composed his anthem The Ways of Zion do mourn (HWV 264). While there is much literature on Handel's anthem, little research has been undertaken on the ceremonial and music of the event as a whole. A first attempt to describe the service in general was made by Annette Landgraf in 2003. However, the exact details of the funeral service and all its music have remained largely unexplored and new findings and conclusions can be offered here.

The Funeral Service

Queen Caroline died on 20 November 1737 and her funeral took place almost a month later, on 17 December 1737, in Henry VII's Chapel in Westminster Abbey. This was the first funeral of a queen consort since that of Anne of Denmark in 1623 and the arrangements for this were taken as a starting point. Referring to Queen Caroline's coronation, Andrew Hanham has argued that her status had then been celebrated almost like that of a ‘joint monarch’. In any case, following the precedent of the previous decades, the queen's funeral was a ‘private’, nocturnal one. Fritz has pointed out that one year previously, in 1736, some officers had hoped to ‘revive’ the grand public funeral for the father of Stephen Martin Leake, then Norroy King of Arms, but that this suggestion was rejected. According to William Wilkins, Queen Caroline herself had specifically requested ‘that her obsequies should be as quiet and simple as possible’. The king attended a short service at St James's Palace before the corpse left for Westminster, but he did not attend the funeral itself, and his daughter Princess Amelia (Amelia-Sophia-Eleanora) acted as chief mourner.