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1206 NOTES TO VOLUME II.
year 1817, when the vault was opened to receive the remains of the
Baroness Nolcken, the lady of the Swedish Ambassador; * on which
occasion Lieutenant or Captain Ludvig Granholm, of the Swedish
navy, being present, and amusing himself either before or after the
funeral, with reading the names on the coffins deposited around, came
to that of Swedenborg ; when observing the coffin lid to be loose,
it occurred to his thoughts , that if he could possess himself of the
skull, he might perhaps dispose of it profitably to some of the ad
mirers of his principles, whom he had heard to be numerous in this
country, but of whom and their sentiments, he had so little knowledge,
as not to be aware that they are the last people on earth to form
an attachment to relics, or to fall into any of the mummery of
saintcraft. He accordingly contrived to withdraw the skull from its
coffin, and, wrapping it in his handkerchief, he carried it off unper
ceived. He afterwards applied to Mr. Hawkins, and to other
members of the Church (see Document 266, p. 555), in hopes of
finding a purchaser; but was disappointed : and at his death, which
happened in London not very long afterwards, the skull came into
the possession of the Minister of the Swedish Church. Its re-interment
was occasioned by the interference of a lady of high rank in Sweden,
who, hearing that it had been removed from the coffin, wrote to a
gentleman in London, to request that he would procure its restoration
to its original situation ; which was accordingly done in the most
private manner.
"Thus all the circumstances in the fabricated narration, which
tend to throw ridicule on the admirers of Swedenborg’s writings, are
utterly untrue.”
* Baron von Beskow in his Biography of Swedenborg, read before the Swedish Academy,
p. 143, in referring to the account given of this occurrence in the "Intellectual Repository,"
Vol. VI, 1823, p. 471 et seq., says, "We have quoted this account in order to direct attention
to several circumstances connected therewith, which are less truthful. The Swedish minister
in London, in the year 1817, was Baron von Rehausen who died in 1822, and whose widow
survived him in Sweden, where she died. His predecessors Adlerberg and Brinkman were
unmarried. That the vault should have been opened on account of the burial of the wife
of some Swedish minister is just as incredible, as that the church-keeper should have allowed
any one to take away Swedenborg’s skull ; and further that a Swedish officer should have
taken possession of it unlawfully, for the purpose of selling it." By referring to the
Anteckningar rörande Svenska Kyrkan i London, we find that Baron von Nolcken, who
was the Swedish minister in London from 1763 to 1793, died in Richmond in England on
December 16, 1812; and that his wife, Baroness Mary von Nolcken, an English lady, died
July 2, 1816, in her seventy-second year. We read also that both were buried in the vault
of the Swedish church. It is therefore not at all improbable that the body of Baroness
von Nolcken in 1817 was deposited in the vault of the Swedish church. In the account as
published in the "Intellectual Repository," the name of the lady whose body was buried in
the Swedish church in 1817, is not given, and hence Baron von Beskow was led to infer
that Baroness von Rehausen was meant.
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