3-017-342 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Funeral of Lord Palmerston: arrival of the hearse at Cambridge House, Piccadilly, 1865. In the evening, '...the body was here received by the nearest surviving kinsman of Lord Palmerston, his sister's son, the Hon. Henry Sulivan, Rector of Yoxall, near Lichfield; and by the Hon. Evelyn Ashley, late his private secretary. It was laid out in the dining-room, with no other ornament than a board with sable plumes laid at the head. Only a very few of Lord Palmerston's most intimate friends, and, two or three days afterwards, Dr. Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, were admitted to see the face of the dead before it was inclosed in the coffin; an artist had previously, however, been employed to take a cast of the features for the use of the future sculptor. The undertakers, Messrs. Banting, of St. James's-street, were busied meanwhile in their preparations for the last and most solemn journey, but with no more pomp than the rank of the deceased nobleman and the public character of the funeral obsequies seemed to require'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.