3-017-339 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Funeral of Lord Palmerston: arrival of the hearse at the West Door of Westminster Abbey, 1865. 'The funeral procession...slowly entered the Broad Sanctuary and set down the appointed personages, the coffin, and the mourners, at the principal door...The mayors and aldermen, who mostly wore their robes, and were, in some cases, attended by their macebearers or ushers, were admitted as fast as they arrived...The volunteers kept the ground, formed in a double line from the Westminster Hospital across to the Crimean monument of the Westminster scholars, opposite the door of Dean's-yard. 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.