The last great occasion on the road, before railways took its traffic away, was the funeral, in 1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline of Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven years before: her body was embarked for Brunswick on August 16, 1821, after a hurried three days' journey from Kensington. So many years have passed by since the stormy times when the nation was divided between partisans of the King on one side and the Queen on the other--both parties equally violent--that the long and bitter quarrels between the "First Gentleman in Europe" and the most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times have become historic, and no longer divide families, or cause fathers to cut their sons off with a shilling, as they did when the trial of the Queen was a recent event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least odiously vulgar and utterly wanting in dignity and the commonest dictates of prudence. They were not worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken up by parties and made political missiles of, so that even the occasion of the Queen's funeral was made the excuse for a riot by her followers, who were indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the country, as they thought, without proper respect. The Queen died on the 7th of August, and it was decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent haste" was the expression used by the _Times_ of that day in describing the funeral arrangements for the 14th, but that journal was a most violent enemy of the then Government and had always supported the Queen and vilified the King as far as it could safely be done. It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty miles between Kensington and Harwich in two days, and the _Times_ furiously bellowed in its reports that the procession was hurried through London at a trot. However that may be, certainly the pace was decently slow when on the open road. Ilford was reached, for instance, at 6·15 that afternoon, but Romford, only five and a half miles further on, not until 7·45; an extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by sympathisers with blazing torches, who stood on guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort and the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn. At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by the light of a full moon which shone in splendour from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the night they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock in the morning. Here the coffin was placed in the church until a start was made again, seven hours later. At last Colchester was reached, at five o'clock in the afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse unguarded in the High Street, while they took their fill at the "Three Cups." Thus, in its squalor and irreverence, the passing of this Queen of England resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or kin.