From the full-length black mourning cloaks once required of mourners, to the carriage accident which gave rise to one of the state funeral’s most poignant features, the final departure of British monarchs has – much like the institution they represent – quietly evolved while maintaining its aura of tradition.
With a grand procession through the streets of London leading to a historic service at Westminster Abbey after a reign lasting decades, there will be several key similarities between Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral on Monday and that of her namesake some four centuries earlier, not least among them a gathering of multitudes to witness the event.
As such, the Virgin Queen’s funeral is one of three royal burials that help chart the change and continuity of such moments in British history.
Queen Victoria, who until Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign was Britain’s longest-serving monarch, obsessed over her death to the extent that she left 12 pages of written instructions, including voluminous details of what was to be placed alongside her in her coffin, to be followed punctiliously. The document was to become in many ways the blueprint for state funerals ever since.
The death of George VI, the Queen’s father, was by definition the last time Britain buried a Sovereign and was arguably the moment at which mass participation in a royal event that is now taken for granted, via the nascent magic of television, became possible.
The death of Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603 harks back to a very different era of monarchy – one of total fealty, in the secular sphere at least, to an absolute ruler and where the cult of personality was if anything more potent than the modern age.
The first Elizabeth endured a slow and undignified end – apparently standing unassisted in her bedchamber in Richmond Palace for 15 hours, out of the fear that she would be unable to stand again if she laid down, and then spending four days on the floor before her servants finally got her into bed.
Legend has it that she had a full inch of makeup on her face when she died. What is undisputed is that she was very vain despite losing all of her hair and most of her teeth by her final days, and she refused to have baths.
Some believe she died of blood poisoning, others think pneumonia or cancer. Her body was embalmed and remained in Richmond for two weeks before being brought down the River Thames on a barge and taken to Whitehall Palace, to lie in state for another three weeks.
Her funeral was finally held on 28 April. The procession was attended by 3,000 mourners. Even the lowest-ranking members of the royal household, such as wine porters and scullery maids, joined the solemn march through the streets of the capital.
It is thought to have been watched by 200,000 people, a figure equaling the entire estimated population of London at the time.
Elizabeth I’s body was encased in lead inside a wooden coffin, which was covered in purple velvet. This was carried on a chariot pulled by four grey horses, with six knights holding a canopy over it.
A life-size painted wooden effigy of Elizabeth lying down with a crown on her head and a sceptre in her hands was placed on top of the coffin, looking so lifelike that mourners are said to have gasped at the sight. It featured a corset, which still survives, and was dressed in her parliamentary robes. The effigy was remade in 1760 with a wax head and this replica is now on display in the Abbey museum.
John Stow, a historian at the time, wrote: “Westminster was surcharged with multitudes of all sorts of people in their streets, houses, windows, leads and gutters, that came out to see the obsequy, and when they beheld her statue lying upon the coffin, there was such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man.”
One person absent from the funeral was Elizabeth’s successor. She may not in reality have been the “Virgin Queen” that she is sometimes called, but she had no children – leading to a sense of anxiety about the future throughout the country for years before her death aged 69 – so James VI of Scotland was chosen as her heir in a move that united the two kingdoms. By the end of her life, Elizabeth could no longer speak but is said to have agreed to the Scottish monarch taking the throne after her by making a circle movement around her head to signal that he should wear the crown.
Despite the length of time between her death and the funeral, and his decision to fork out the £11,000 cost – truly a princely sum back then – the new king of England opted not to arrive in London until after ceremony. He left Scotland on 5 April but spent time enjoying himself on hunts during his slow journey south. James I, as he became in England, had still only reached Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire by the day of the funeral.
Elizabeth I was initially buried in the same vault within Westminster Abbey as her grandfather, Henry VII. But her successor commissioned a white marble monument and in 1606 her body was placed underneath that in the Lady Chapel, together with the body of her half sister Mary I.
The Latin inscription on her monument celebrates the perceived achievements of her reign. “Sacred to memory: Religion to its primitive purity restored, peace settled, money restored to its just value, domestic rebellion quelled, France relieved when involved with intestine divisions; the Netherlands supported; the Spanish Armada vanquished; Ireland almost lost by rebels, eased by routing the Spaniard; the revenues of both universities much enlarged by a Law of Provisions; and lastly, all England enriched.”
Just as the Victorians were obsessed with the fact and symbolism of death, so too was the queen whose name embodied her era. For some four decades of her 64-year reign, Victoria chose to wear black mourning clothes in memory of her husband, Prince Albert, who died in 1861.
So when Victoria died at Osborne House, her retreat on the Isle of Wight, on 22 January 1901 at the age of 81, it would have been something of a surprise to her subjects to learn that she had stipulated that white was to be the signature colour of her funeral.
The monarch was buried in her wedding veil, with her coffin covered in a white and gold pall to be placed on a gun carriage conveyed by white horses. The preponderance of black seen at state funerals for centuries before – Tudor mourners wore hooded black cloaks whose voluminosity was strictly controlled according to aristocratic seniority – was replaced with a regal purple to sit alongside the symbolic flashes of white.
It was one change among many to the fundamental style and substance of royal state funerals that has stayed in place since Victoria, who had long been fixated with the choreography of her own passing, reputedly dictated a 12-page memorandum to her personal physician, Sir James Reid, detailing her requirements – and vision – for her funeral.
Much of the document related to the grave goods which the queen wanted her faithful doctor and aides to ensure were placed in her coffin, including a lock of the hair of John Brown, the faithful Balmoral manservant who became Victoria’s closest companion and is thought by some historians to have been her lover. The items from Brown, including letters to the monarch and photographs, were carefully hidden under flowers in the casket so members of the Royal Family, in particular Victoria’s successor Edward VII, who despised the servant’s closeness to his mother, knew nothing of their presence.
But it was the style of Victoria’s funeral which proved its most enduring legacy. Whereas previous monarchs had been buried after processions led by senior courtiers and counsellors, the queen stipulated that she wished to be treated as a “soldier’s daughter” with the military for the first time taking the lead role in proceedings, including conveying her coffin on a gun carriage.
It was the stipulation of the gun carriage, which Victoria had noted and admired at the funeral of the Duke of Albany in 1884, and the intervention of a faulty coupling that prompted a change to the choreography of state funerals ever since.
Royal legend has it that a bolting horse at Windsor station prompted the intervention which led to 98 Royal Navy sailors improvising by rigging ropes to Victoria’s gun carriage and hauling the coffin to the funeral service at St George’s Chapel within the confines of the castle.
In reality, it was the failure of a metal eyelet linking the carriage to the horses’ reins which prompted the intervention. In a letter to The Times, written 35 years later, an officer who had witnessed the incident said a contingent of sailors had “promptly and gallantly” stepped in to haul the coffin before soldiers from the Royal Artillery could fix the problem, and in so doing allowed the Royal Navy steal into perpetuity the honour of conveying British monarchs to their last resting place.
The funeral of the Queen’s father following his death at Sandringham from lung cancer on 6 February 1952 was in many ways the most loyal so far to the royal convention established by Victoria and her successors.
Although Victoria did not lie in state in Westminster Hall, her successors did, establishing the practice seen so vividly in recent days as members of the public pay homage to a dead Sovereign by walking past the coffin.
All the ingredients that will be present on Monday – from attendance of dignitaries from across the world to the dolorous ceremonial splendour of the Sovereign’s last journey to Windsor – were played out in 1952.
After being brought to London by train, George VI lay in state for three days, during which some 304,000 people filed past the catafalque. The figure was fewer than had done so for the king’s father, George V, a turnout that was attributed to the fact that the Queen’s father was the first monarch to be buried in the television age.
While the coronation of Elizabeth II in June 1953 is widely held to have been Britain’s first communal televised event, appetite for living a national moment via the flickering box in the living room was established by George VIs funeral as Britons realised they could in some sense witness history and flocked to buy televisions – at vast expense, given that the average set cost some four times the average monthly wage.
The death of the king and its surrounding ceremonial moments also established that other vital ingredient of the state funeral – the sonorous yet sombre, dignified yet apposite commentary of a senior broadcaster. The BBC received widespread plaudits for the description of the George VI funeral procession to Westminster Hall provided by Richard Dimbleby, whose subsequent commentaries, including that of the Queen’s coronation, are widely regarded as the gold standard of televised explication to an audience of millions.
It is with such incremental steps that the state funeral of a monarch has reached its present incarnation – an amalgam of centuries-old tradition and convention, tweaked and smoothed to suit the relevant moment.
In the case of Elizabeth II, a significant change will be the fact that she is the first monarch since George II in 1760 to have a funeral that includes a service at Westminster Abbey – the formal funeral service for the Sovereign has been held at St George’s Chapel in Windsor since 1820.
And yet – from the lead-lined coffin of Elizabeth I, to the gun carriage of Victoria to the rapt televised audience of George VI – much else will feel familiar.
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