The proclamations will only just be getting started. From St James’s, the Garter King of Armsand half a dozen other heralds, looking like extras from an expensive Shakespeare production, will go by carriage to the statue of Charles I, at the base of Trafalgar Square, which marks London’s official midpoint, and read out the news again. A 41-gun salute – almost seven minutes of artillery – will be fired from Hyde Park. “There is no concession to modernity in this,” one former palace official told me. There will be cocked hats and horses everywhere. One of the concerns of the broadcasters is what the crowds will look like as they seek to record these moments of history. “The whole world is going to be bloody doing this,” said one news executive, holding up his phone in front of his face. On the old boundary of the City of London, outside the Royal Courts of Justice, a red cord will hang across the road. The City Marshal, a former police detective chief superintendent named Philip Jordan, will be waiting on a horse. The heralds will be formally admitted to the City, and there will be more trumpets and more announcements: at the Royal Exchange, and then in a chain reaction across the country. Sixty-five years ago, there were crowds of 10,000 in Birmingham; 5,000 in Manchester; 15,000 in Edinburgh. High Sheriffs stood on the steps of town halls, and announced the new sovereign according to local custom. In York, the Mayor raised a toast to the Queen from a cup made of solid gold. The same rituals will take place,but this time around the new king will also go out to meet his people. From his proclamation at St James’s, Charles will immediately tour the country, visiting Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff to attend services of remembrance for his mother and to meet the leaders of the devolved governments. There will also be civic receptions, for teachers, doctors and other ordinary folk, which are intended to reflect the altered spirit of his reign. “From day one, it is about the people rather than just the leaders being part of this new monarchy,” said one of his advisers, who described the plans for Charles’s progress as: “Lots of not being in a car, but actually walking around.” In the capital, the pageantry of royal death and accession will be archaic and bewildering. But from another city each day, there will be images of the new king mourning alongside his subjects, assuming his almighty, lonely role in the public imagination. “It is see and be seen,” the adviser said. For a long time, the art of royal spectacle was for other, weaker peoples: Italians, Russians, and Habsburgs. British ritual occasions were a mess. At the funeral of Princess Charlotte, in 1817, the undertakers were drunk. Ten years later, St George’s Chapel was so cold during the burial of the Duke of York that George Canning, the foreign secretary, contracted rheumatic fever and the bishop of London died. “We never saw so motley, so rude, so ill-managed a body of persons,” reported the Times on the funeral of George IV, in 1830. Victoria’s coronation a few years later was nothing to write home about. The clergy got lost in the words; the singing was awful; and the royal jewellers made the coronation ring for the wrong finger. “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial,” the Marquess of Salisbury wrote in 1860. “In England the case is exactly the reverse.” What we think of as the ancient rituals of the monarchy were mainly crafted in the late 19th century, towards the end of Victoria’s reign. Courtiers, politicians and constitutional theorists such as Walter Bagehot worried about the dismal sight of the Empress of India trooping around Windsor in her donkey cart. If the crown was going to give up its executive authority, it would have to inspire loyalty and awe by other means – and theatre was part of the answer. “The more democratic we get,” wrote Bagehot in 1867, “the more we shall get to like state and show.” Obsessed by death, Victoria planned her own funeral with some style. But it was her son, Edward VII, who is largely responsible for reviving royal display. One courtier praised his “curious power of visualising a pageant”. He turned the state opening of parliament and military drills, like the Trooping of the Colour, into full fancy-dress occasions, and at his own passing, resurrected the medieval ritual of lying in state. Hundreds of thousands of subjects filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall in 1910, granting a new sense of intimacy to the body of the sovereign. By 1932, George V was a national father figure, giving the first royal Christmas speech to the nation – a tradition that persists today – in a radio address written for him by Rudyard Kipling. The shambles and the remoteness of the 19th-century monarchy were replaced by an idealised family and historic pageantry invented in the 20th. In 1909, Kaiser Wilhelm II boasted about the quality of German martial processions: “The English cannot come up to us in this sort of thing.” Now we all know that no one else quite does it like the British. The Queen, by all accounts a practical and unsentimental person, understands the theatrical power of the crown. “I have to be seen to be believed,” is said to be one of her catchphrases. And there is no reason to doubt that her funeral rites will evoke a rush of collective feeling. “I think there will be a huge and very genuine outpouring of deep emotion,” said Andrew Roberts, the historian. It will be all about her, and it will really be about us. There will be an urge to stand in the street, to see it with your own eyes, to be part of a multitude. The cumulative effect will be conservative. “I suspect the Queen’s death will intensify patriotic feelings,” one constitutional thinker told me, “and therefore fit the Brexit mood, if you like, and intensify the feeling that there is nothing to learn from foreigners.” The wave of feeling will help to swamp the awkward facts of the succession.The rehabilitation of Camilla as the Duchess of Cornwall has been a quiet success for the monarchy, but her accession as queen will test how far that has come. Since she married Charles in 2005, Camilla has been officially known as Princess Consort, a formulation that has no historical or legal meaning. (“It’s bullshit,” one former courtier told me, describing it as “a sop to Diana”.) The fiction will end when Elizabeth II dies. Under common law, Camilla will become queen — the title always given to the wives of kings. There is no alternative. “She is queen whatever she is called,” as one scholar put it. “If she is called Princess Consort there is an implication that she is not quite up to it. It’s a problem.” There are plans to clarify this situation before the Queen dies, but King Charles is currently expected to introduce Queen Camilla at his Accession Council on D+1. (Camilla was invited to join the Privy Council last June, so she will be present.) Confirmation of her title will form part of the first tumultuous 24 hours. please log in to view this image Crowds watch naval ratings pulling the gun carriage bearing the coffin of Sir Winston Churchill to St Paul’s Cathedral. Photograph: PA The Commonwealth is the other knot. In 1952, at the last accession, there were only eight members of the new entity taking shape in the outline of the British Empire. The Queen was the head of state in seven of them, and she was proclaimed Head of the Commonwealth to accommodate India’s lone status as a republic. Sixty-five years later, there are 36 republics in the organisation, which the Queen has attended assiduously throughout her reign, and now comprises a third of the world’s population. The problem is that the role is not hereditary, and there is no procedure for choosing the next one. “It’s a complete grey area,” said Philip Murphy, director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. For several years, the palace has been discreetly trying to ensure Charles’s succession as head of the bloc, in the absence of any other obvious option. Last October, Julia Gillard, the former prime minister of Australia, revealed that Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, had visited her in February 2013 to ask her to support the idea. Canada and New Zealand have since fallen into line, but the title is unlikely to be included in King Charles’s proclamation. Instead it will be part of the discreet international lobbying that takes place as London fills up with diplomats and presidents in the days after the Queen’s death. There will be serious, busy receptions at the palace. “We are not talking about entertaining. But you have to show some form of respect for the fact that they have come,” said one courtier. “Such feasting and commingling, with my father still unburied, seemed to me unfitting and heartless,” wrote Edward VIII in his memoirs. The show must go on. Business will mix with grief. There will be a thousand final preparations in the nine days before the funeral. Soldiers will walk the processional routes. Prayers will be rehearsed. On D+1, Westminster Hall will be locked, cleaned and its stone floor covered with 1,500 metres of carpet. Candles, their wicks already burnt in, will be brought over from the Abbey. The streets around will be converted into ceremonial spaces. The bollards on the Mall will be removed, and rails put up to protect the hedges. There is space for 7,000 seats on Horse Guards Parade and 1,345 on Carlton House Terrace. In 1952, all the rhododendrons in Parliament Square were pulled up and women were barred from the roof of Admiralty Arch. “Nothing can be done to protect the bulbs,” noted the Ministry of Works. The Queen’s 10 pallbearers will be chosen, and practise carrying their burden out of sight in a barracks somewhere. British royals are buried in lead-lined coffins. Diana’s weighed a quarter of a ton. The population will slide between sadness and irritability. In 2002, 130 people complained to the BBC about its insensitive coverage of the Queen Mother’s death; another 1,500 complained that Casualty was moved to BBC2. The TV schedules in the days after the Queen’s death will change again. Comedy won’t be taken off the BBCcompletely, but most satire will. There will be Dad’s Armyreruns, but no Have I Got News For You. People will be touchy either way. After the death of George VI, in a society much more Christian and deferential than this one, a Mass Observation survey showed that people objected to the endless maudlin music, the forelock-tugging coverage. “Don’t they think of old folk, sick people, invalids?” one 60-year old woman asked. “It’s been terrible for them, all this gloom.” In a bar in Notting Hill, one drinker said, “He’s only **** and soil now like anyone else,”which started a fight. Social media will be a tinderbox. In 1972, the writer Brian Masters estimated that around a third of us have dreamed about the Queen – she stands for authority and our mothers. People who are not expecting to cry will cry. On D+4, the coffin will move to Westminster Hall, to lie in state for four full days. The procession from Buckingham Palace will be the first great military parade of London Bridge: down the Mall, through Horse Guards, and past the Cenotaph. More or less the same slow march, from St James’s Palace for the Queen Mother in 2002, involved 1,600 personnel and stretched for half a mile. The bands played Beethoven and a gun was fired every minute from Hyde Park. The route is thought to hold around a million people. The plan to get them there is based on the logistics for the London 2012 Olympics. There may be corgis. In 1910, the mourners for Edward VII were led by his fox terrier, Caesar. His son’s coffin was followed to Wolferton station, at Sandringham, by Jock, a white shooting pony. The procession will reach Westminster Hall on the hour. The timing will be just so. “Big Ben beginning to chime as the wheels come to a stop,” as one broadcaster put it. Everything will feel fantastically well-ordered and consoling and designed to within a quarter of an inch, because it is Inside the hall, there will be psalms as the coffin is placed on a catafalque draped in purple. King Charleswill be back from his tour of the home nations, to lead the mourners. The orb, the sceptre and the Imperial Crown will be fixed in place, soldiers will stand guard and then the doors opened to the multitude that will have formed outside and will now stream past the Queen for 23 hours a day. For George VI, 305,000 subjects came. The line was four miles long. The palace is expecting half a million for the Queen. There will be a wondrous queue – the ultimate British ritual undertaking, with canteens, police, portable toilets and strangers talking cautiously to one another – stretching down to Vauxhall Bridge and then over the river and back along the Albert Embankment. MPs will skip to the front. Under the chestnut roof of the hall, everything will feel fantastically well-ordered and consoling and designed to within a quarter of an inch, because it is. A 47-page internal report compiled after George VI’s funeral suggested attaching metal rollers to the catafalque, to smooth the landing of the coffin when it arrives. Four soldiers will stand silent vigil for 20 minutes at a time, with two ready in reserve. The RAF, the Army, the Royal Navy, the Beefeaters, the Gurkhas – everyone will take part. The most senior officer of the four will stand at the foot of the coffin, the most junior at the head. The wreaths on the coffin will be renewed every day. For Churchill’s lying in state in 1965, a replica of the hall was set up in the ballroom of the St Ermin’s hotel nearby, so soldiers could practise their movements before they went on duty. In 1936, the four sons of George V revived The Prince’s Vigil, in which members of the royal family arrive unannounced and stand watch. The Queen’s children and grandchildren – including women for the first time – will do the same. Before dawn on D+9, the day of the funeral, in the silent hall, the jewels will be taken off the coffin and cleaned. In 1952, it took three jewellers almost two hours to remove all the dust. (The Star of Africa, on the royal sceptre, is the second-largest cut diamond in the world.) Most of the country will be waking to a day off. Shops will close, or go to bank holiday hours. Some will display pictures of the Queen in their windows. The stock market will not open. The night before, there will have been church services in towns across the UK. There are plans to open football stadiums for memorial services if necessary. At 9am, Big Ben will strike. The bell’s hammer will then be covered with a leather pad seven-sixteenths of an inch thick, and it will ring out in muffled tones. The distance from Westminster Hall to the Abbey is only a few hundred metres. The occasion will feel familiar, even though it is new: the Queen will be the first British monarch to have her funeral in the Abbey since 1760. The 2,000 guests will be sitting inside. Television cameras, in hides made of painted bricks, will search for the images that we will remember. In 1965, the dockers dipped their cranes for Churchill. In 1997, it was the word “Mummy” on the flowers for Diana from her sons.
When the coffin reaches the abbey doors, at 11 o’clock, the country will fall silent. The clatter will still. Train stations will cease announcements. Buses will stop and drivers will get out at the side of the road. In 1952, at the same moment, all of the passengers on a flight from London to New York rose from their seats and stood, 18,000 feet above Canada, and bowed their heads. Back then, the stakes were clearer, or at least they seemed that way. A stammering king had been part of the embattled British way of life that had survived an existential war. The wreath that Churchill laid said: “For Gallantry.” The BBC commentator in 1952, the man who deciphered the rubies and the rituals for the nation, was Richard Dimbleby, the first British reporter to enter Bergen-Belsen and convey its horrors, seven years before. “How true tonight that statement spoken by an unknown man of his beloved father,” murmured Dimbleby, describing the lying in state to millions. “The sunset of his death tinged the whole world’s sky.” The trumpets and the ancientness were proof of our survival; and the king’s young daughter would rule the peace. “These royal ceremonies represented decency, tradition, and public duty, in contradiction to the ghastliness of Nazism,” as one historian told me. The monarchy had traded power for theatre, and in the aftermath of war, the illusion became more powerful than anyone could have imagined. “It was restorative,” Jonathan Dimbleby, Richard’s son and biographer, told me. His brother, David, is likely to be behind the BBC microphone this time. The question will be what the bells and the emblems and the heralds represent now. At what point does the pomp of an imperial monarchy become ridiculous amid the circumstances of a diminished nation? “The worry,” a historian said, “is that it is just circus animals.” If the monarchy exists as theatre, then this doubt is the part of the drama. Can they still pull it off? Knowing everything that we know in 2017, how can it possibly hold that a single person might contain the soul of a nation? The point of the monarchy is not to answer such questions. It is to continue. “What a lot of our life we spend in acting,” the Queen Mother used to say. Inside the Abbey, the archbishop will speak. During prayers, the broadcasters will refrain from showing royal faces. When the coffin emerges again, the pallbearers will place it on the green gun carriage that was used for the Queen’s father, and his father and his father’s father, and 138 junior sailors will drop their heads to their chests and pull. The tradition of being hauled by the Royal Navy began in 1901 when Victoria’s funeral horses, all white, threatened to bolt at Windsor Station and a waiting contingent of ratings stepped in to pull the coffin instead. The procession will swing on to the Mall. In 1952, the RAF was grounded out of respect for King George VI. In 2002, at 12.45pm, a Lancaster bomber and two Spitfires flew over the cortege for his wife and dipped their wings. The crowds will be deep for the Queen. She will get everything. From Hyde Park Corner, the hearse will go 23 miles by road to Windsor Castle, which claims the bodies of British sovereigns. The royal household will be waiting for her, standing on the grass. Then the cloister gates will be closed and cameras will stop broadcasting. Inside the chapel, the lift to the royal vault will descend, and King Charles will drop a handful of red earth from a silver bowl.
The old nazi has led a pampered life and has never done a days work so she'll no doubt live to at least 120
And LL will still blame Rob Green for diving comically across the cortège and failing to hold onto the coffin..
Ffs Elland could have put read when you have a few hours to waste.She probably died when I was half way through it
