Funeral honours Queen’s ‘lifelong sense of duty’
A private ceremony follows the state funeral where the nation mourned its longest serving monarch
Queen Elizabeth II was to be laid to rest alongside her beloved husband Prince Philip at the end of a solemn day to mark her state funeral.
The King and the royal family were reported to be gathering at King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle on Monday evening for the “deeply personal” private burial service at the chapel which houses the Queen’s father George VI, her mother the Queen Mother and sister Princess Margaret.
When Prince Philip died 17 months ago, his coffin was interred in the Royal Vault of St George’s – ready to be moved to the memorial chapel when the Queen died.
The private ceremony on Monday evening due to be led by the Dean of Windsor was in stark contrast to the pageantry and public grief shown during the very public state funeral.
King Charles spent the day leading his family and the nation in mourning for its longest reigning monarch.
Two thousand people including members of foreign royal families, world leaders, presidents and prime ministers were packed into Westminster Abbey for the funeral.
The service at the gothic church was the centrepiece of a day of pageantry, military processions and solemnity in honour of the late Queen.
The late monarch’s lying in state came to an end at 6.30am on Monday morning.
The coffin was carried from Westminster Hall to the Royal Navy’s State Gun Carriage positioned outside the building’s
North Door shortly after 10.35am.
A solemn procession accompanied by pipers transported the coffin from New Palace Yard through Parliament Square and on to Westminster Abbey just before 11am.
Thousands of people marked the route ahead of the hour-long service which ended with the playing of
The Last Post, Reveille, the national anthem and a lament.
After the service, the coffin was placed on the State Gun Carriage outside the abbey and a procession then took the coffin through the packed streets of London to Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner.
At Wellington Arch, the Queen’s coffin was transferred to the State Hearse just after 1pm, ahead of the journey to Windsor.
When the hearse arrived in Windsor at around 3pm there was a further procession which came to its end at the bottom of the West Steps of St George’s Chapel in Horseshoe Cloister.
There, the bearer party carried the coffin in procession up the steps into the chapel for the committal service at
4pm.
More than 10,000 military staff performed their last duty to the Queen during the funeral.
The weekend before the funeral was marked by a number of formal and informal events.
On Saturday evening, the Queen’s eight grandchildren staged a heart-rending evening vigil around their beloved Granny’s coffin, and the day before the funeral the country observed a minute’s silence to remember the Queen.
The silence came as people continued to queue for the final day of the lying in state in Westminster Hall, where the late monarch’s coffin remained until 6.30am on Monday.
Queue times varied throughout the lying in state period, but reached a peak of more than 25 hours in the early hours of Saturday.
On the eve of the funeral King Charles III hosted a reception for visiting world leaders and official overseas guests at Buckingham Palace.
The funeral and processions to and from Westminster Abbey were shown on giant screens in various locations across the UK, from London’s Hyde Park to Coleraine Town Hall in Northern Ireland.
Around 125 cinemas also screened the event, along with Sky News, ITV and the BBC for people watching from home. Transport for London (TfL) had prepared for around one
million people to visit the capital to attend the funeral, with around 250 extra rail services being laid on.