‘Share with me in my Grief and Affliction’: Royal Sorrow and Public Mourning in Early Eighteenth-Century England

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, English royal funerals became private affairs, displacing the centre of public commemoration of royal deaths. Print took the place of the traditional public funeral as the forum for both royal and public mourning. Throughout the period, affective rhetoric became a greater part of the mourning dialogue between court and public that occurred in print. An examination of this language suggests that early political newspapers were proponents of the nascent culture of sensibility.