"The day of the interment was dark and cold, and drizzling. Although the
last offices were performed in the most scrupulously private manner, the
feelings of the community could not be repressed. From nine till eleven
o'clock that day all the British shipping in the docks and the river,
from London Bridge to Gravesend, hoisted their flags half-mast high, and
minute guns were fired from appointed stations along the Thames. The
same mournful ceremony was observed in all the ports of England and
Ireland; and not only in these, for the flag was half-mast high on every
British ship at Antwerp, at Rotterdam, at Havre.
"Ere the last minute gun sounded all was over. Followed to his tomb by
those brothers who, if not consoled, might at this moment be sustained
by the remembrance that to him they had ever been brothers, not only in
name but in spirit, the vault at length closed on the mortal remains of
George Bentinck."
Such was the conventional view which Society took of the sad
circumstances of Lord George's death.
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