Just as the Queen lived for her office and the country, so Britain said goodbye to her: with a grandiose funeral marked by tradition, protocol, discipline and compassion.
The long time of farewell is over. The Queen’s funeral marks the final act of ten days of mourning in Britain, when the clocks stood still, Parliament should no longer argue and hundreds of thousands queued for days to say goodbye to the dead Queen. The mourning marathon was linked to the notion that the country had not only lost a figure of the century, but also its most radiant advocate.
Spectators lined the streets hours before the funeral service in Westminster Abbey. The first guests, to whom the queen was deeply attached, also arrived early in the church. There she had married, witnessed her coronation, her mother’s funeral, and the weddings of her children and grandchildren. It is a place of death and renewal, the BBC spokesman said. The Brits, normally averse to pathos, allowed themselves to be solemnly moved as on almost no occasion before. The Times described the event as the largest and most complex event in post-war England. An employee of the charity Royal Variety Performance Queen casually called the occasion “The Greatest Show on Earth”.
An event of global appeal
Members of the royal household, representatives of charities, military dignitaries, war veterans, kings and queens mingled in the church. Present were statesmen such as Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Swiss Federal President Ignazio Cassis. All of the country’s surviving former prime ministers appeared in unison, from John Major to Liz Truss. It was a British event with global appeal, just like the woman it was for.
At 10:30 a.m., the carriages of the closest members of the royal family drove down the flag-bedecked boulevard The Mall to applause from the audience. At the same time, Big Ben’s bell rang 96 times for each year of life of the deceased. Unlike previous royal burials, the generation of grandchildren played a major role. Even great-grandchildren were allowed to be there: the monarchy, which is so good at remembering the past, is also thinking about the future. Towards the end of the service in Westminster Abbey, those present honored the new king with the national anthem, which now begins with the words “God Save the King”.
“People who serve lovingly are rare in all walks of life,” Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said in his address. He honored the faith and sense of duty of a woman who saw herself as the servant of her people. Many rapidly changing voices, men and women of different Christian denominations, clerical and secular, were heard at the funeral services at Westminster Abbey and later at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. There were no long speeches. The obituaries and mourners were as inclusive as the Queen herself.
Everyone submits to the ritual planned with millimeter precision
After the first church ceremony, the coffin, the sight of which was now familiar to the whole world, left Westminster Abbey on a gun carriage. The funeral was also a flawless display of discipline and one of the largest military parades in the country’s history, preceded by several decades of planning. Everything had been planned well in advance, even the coffin had been ready for decades. Now he carried sceptre, crown and orb. Next to it, the floral bouquet with herbs, roses, oak leaves and myrtle branches looked like an untamed piece of nature in a ritual measured to the millimeter. Each branch was meaningful, from rosemary, which is Shakespeare’s plant of remembrance, to myrtle, which grew from a pupil of the queen’s bridal bouquet.
Again and again, even later in the procession through the city, the camera rose high above the events and celebrated the geometric-abstract symmetries, the clockwork-like accuracy, slowness and grandiosity of the spectacle, in which every step, every movement and its rituals were spot on pallbearers, choristers, bishops and kings alike submitted. The Christian Occident appeared in image, action and claim to power.
After leaving Westminster Abbey, the coffin was hauled in a procession through London along the Mall to Wellington Arch in Hyde Park. On the way was Buckingham Palace, the home of the Queen for seventy years. All employees lined up in front of the palace to bow one last time to their royal employer. The funeral marches played by the military bands were only interrupted by the funeral salute from the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery cannons.
Flower greetings from the crowds
The formality of the state event eased during the drive from London to St George’s Chapel in Windsor – in a hearse specially designed for the occasion by Jaguar Land Rover to royal specifications. The crowds lining the streets had brought flowers and applauded. When the State Hearse reached its destination, it was covered in flowers.
The moment the carriage passed the gates of Windsor Castle, the audience saw the Queen for the very last time. After that, only television pictures from the chapel followed. It was where she had sat, tiny, hunched over and alone, at the christening ceremony for her husband, Prince Philip, more than a year ago. As a child she played in the palace and its park, and she mainly lived there during the war and in the last months of her life. The theatrical splendor of the state funeral came to an end. At the very end, a bagpiper turned to a side entrance and walked away slowly playing: this image of farewell had already existed at her husband’s funeral.
The celebrations corresponded to the strictly formal acting woman, who had recognized protocol and etiquette, rules, law and tradition as vital to the essence of the parliamentary monarchy and lived according to them. Her funeral was as stately as the life of the Queen: an expression of the respect for her office as a personal achievement.