It was finally decided to take the direct route to London. Orders were again sent that the procession _must_ go round, and not through the City. The crowd, however, prevented it from turning into Hyde Park or up Park Lane. But by a rapid manœuvre, part of the troops with the hearse forced their way into the Park, the gate was closed on the mob, and the body was taken at full gallop from Hyde Park Corner to the Cumberland Gate. There the crowd forestalled them, and made all progress impossible. Volleys were fired, and caused a temporary giving way, which enabled the procession to move towards Edgware Road, which was also rendered impassable. All this went on in a terrible storm of wind and rain. After again firing on the populace, with the result that only a little headway was made, and struggling for seven hours to obey orders, those in command of the procession were forced to turn back and pass by Tyburn, Oxford Street, Holborn, and Drury Lane into the Strand, to the City. For thus giving way the officer in command lost his commission. It is impossible to contemplate such an outrageous scene without a glance at that calm February morning, almost a century later, grey, still and chilly, when from early dawn the population of London—even to the loafer and the noisy hooligan of the street—went with subdued demeanour towards Hyde Park, there to stand, or sit in the trees for hours, until the funeral _cortége_ of Queen Victoria should pass through London. Even Nature herself seemed to hold her breath as the stately procession wound its way across the Park, on that very road taken by the galloping horses eighty years before. Where a raging crowd had run yelling with fury and indignation in Park Lane, a mass of the people silently stood with bared heads—rows upon rows of them—as that simple gun-carriage, with its regal burden, slowly filed by and vanished through the Marble Arch. Where the clattering hoofs of the soldiers’ steeds at the funeral of Caroline of Brunswick had mixed with the fury of the storm, sovereigns, princes, ambassadors, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors, paced by with saddened mien, to the muffled strains of military bands—a pageant as imposing as it was solemn. But returning to those days of George IV., one notable figure at least must not escape mention—the beautiful Lady Blessington. How beautiful she was subsequent generations have learnt from the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, now among the treasures of the Wallace Collection—a portrait which probably has been more often engraved than the work of any other British portrait-painter. She is represented about eighteen years of age, when she had recently come from Ireland, and in the first flush of her maidenhood; though, in fact, she had been forced into marriage when only fourteen with a worthless Captain Farmer, whom she left after three months.