3-017-335 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Funeral of Lord Palmerston: the clergy receiving the body at the West Door of Westminster Abbey, 1865. 'The central part of the floor of the nave was kept clear and open for the procession to pass up from the west door to the transept, but the side aisles were filled with a closely-packed congregation, aal dressed in black, amongst whom the nearest to the coffin, as it was borne along, were thirty or forty of Lord Palmerston's servants and farm-labourers, with some of his tenants from Romsey and elsewhere, who had come to London that morning on purpose to attend the funeral...The great bell of the Abbey was continually tolling, and summoning the thoughts of the people to the stern fact of death, ever relentlessly repeating, like a fatal monosyllable, the same deep, unmistakable tone. Several thousand persons, of both sexes, of all ages, and of different classes, filled the whole available space and saw the proudly-decorated hearse stop at the Abbey door; they saw the crimson coffin lifted out and covered with that large black and white pall of velvet and satin, which some of the most illustrious men in England stood ready to bear. Then it was carried into the Abbey, at the door of which it was received by Dean Stanley...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.