Caroline was not inferior to her lord. It is true that of crown jewels she had none, save a pearl necklace, the solitary spoil left of all the gems, ‘rich and rare,’ which had belonged to Queen Anne, and which had, for the most part, been distributed by the late King among his favourites of every degree. Caroline wore on the occasion of her crowning, not only the pearl necklace of Queen Anne, but ‘she had on her head and shoulders all the pearls and necklaces which she could borrow from the ladies of quality at one end of the town, and on her petticoat all the diamonds she could hire of the Jews and jewellers at the other; so,’ adds Lord Hervey, from whom this detail is taken, ‘the appearance and the truth of her finery was a mixture of magnificence and meanness, not unlike the _éclat_ of royalty in many other particulars, when it comes to be nicely examined and its sources traced to what money hires and flattery lends.’ The Queen dressed for the grand ceremony in a private room at Westminster. Early in the morning she put on ‘an undress’ at St. James’s, of which we are told that ‘everything was new.’ She was carried across St. James’s Park privately in a chair, bearing no distinctive mark upon it, and preceded, at a short distance, by the Lord Chancellor and Mrs. Howard, both of whom were in ‘hack sedans.’ She was dressed by that lady. Mrs. Herbert, another bed-chamber woman, would fain have shared in the honour, but as she was herself in full dress for the ceremony, she was pronounced incapable of attiring her who was to be the heroine of it. At the conclusion of the august affair the Queen unrobed in an adjacent apartment, and, as in the morning, was smuggled back to St. James’s in a private chair. Magnificent as Caroline was in borrowed finery at her coronation, she was excelled in point of show by Mrs. Oldfield, on the stage at Drury Lane. The theatre was closed on the night of the real event--the government had no idea then of dividing a multitude; but the management expended a thousand pounds in getting up the pageant of the crowning of Anne Boleyn, at the close of ‘Henry VIII.’ In this piece, Booth made Henry the principal character, and Cibber’s Wolsey sank to a second-rate part. The pageant, however, was so attractive, that it was often played, detached from the piece, at the conclusion of a comedy or any other play. Caroline went more than once with her royal consort to witness this representation, an honour which was refused to the more vulgar show, which had but indifferent success, at Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields.