The Entry of Queen Caroline into Jerusalem (1814)
In 1814, Queen Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of Britain’s Prince Regent (later King George IV), travelled through the Eastern Mediterranean and made a dramatic visit to Jerusalem. Her journey reflected a wider European fascination with the Holy Land during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, when many Western travellers viewed Jerusalem through romantic and biblical imagination rather than everyday reality.
Caroline was accompanied and influenced by figures such as Lady Hester Stanhope, an independent and unconventional British aristocrat who later lived permanently in the Middle East, and by religious ideas circulating in Britain at the time that believed the restoration of Jerusalem and the Jewish people would play a role in the Second Coming of Christ.
One influential voice was Richard Brothers, a religious visionary who claimed divine authority and wrote about a future “New Jerusalem.” Although his ideas were considered extreme in his lifetime, similar restorationist beliefs later influenced British religious thinking and policy in the region.
Caroline’s symbolic entry into Jerusalem — riding on a donkey in imitation of Christ — illustrates how faith, imagination, politics, and personal ambition intertwined in early nineteenth-century European encounters with the Holy Land. This period helped shape how Western nations later viewed Jerusalem and the wider Middle East.
Interesting period of history.
