The Queen is to lie in state
for four days at Westminster Hall after her coffin was carried there from
Buckingham Palace on a horse-drawn gun carriage.
As thousands of people queued
on Wednesday to pay their last respects, Big Ben tolled every minute and King
Charles and his siblings, the Princess Royal, the Duke of York and the Earl of
Wessex, walked directly to the rear of the coffin, followed by the Prince of
Wales, the Duke of Sussex and Peter Phillips, the son of the Princess Royal.
The oak casket was placed on a
raised catafalque in the centre of the hall. After a service led by the
Archbishop of Canterbury, bodyguards and officers stood to watch around the
casket, which was illuminated by four tall candles.
The ceremony was attended by
the prime minister, Liz Truss, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, and the leaders
of other political parties and high commissioners from realms for whom the
Queen was head of state.
Crowds lined the route along
the Mall, adorned with dozens of union flags, past Horse Guards and along
Whitehall to Parliament Square in a 38-minute procession from the palace that
was the Queen’s London residence after 1953. Heathrow airport delayed flights
to “ensure silence over central London”.
Minute guns were fired from
Hyde Park by the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery as 10 pallbearers – former
service equerries to the Queen – flanked the coffin.
The casket was draped with the
royal standard, on to which was placed a velvet cushion bearing the imperial
state crown, made for the coronation of King George VI in 1937. It glitters
with 2,868 diamonds and a sapphire, set in the centre of the topmost cross, and
is said to have been discovered in 1163 in the tomb of Edward the Confessor,
the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.
Alongside it was laid a wreath
of white roses and dahlias studded with pine from the gardens at the royal
estate in Balmoral, where the Queen died last Thursday. From the gardens at
Windsor, the Queen’s main home in later years, were taken lavender, rosemary,
which symbolizes remembrance, and pittosporum.
The bands of the Scots and
Grenadier Guards played funeral marches by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin and
Panne. The pace was beaten on a muffled black-draped drum at 75 paces a minute.
The public will be able to
file past the coffin from 5pm on Wednesday until dawn on Monday, the day of the
state funeral at Westminster Abbey. The BBC is running a live stream of the
scene so people who cannot come to London, or who decide not to endure extremely
long waits in a slow-moving queue, can pay their respects virtually.
Night-time temperatures were forecast to drop to 8C.
Five million people around the
world followed online the route of the Royal Air Force flight carrying the
Queen’s coffin from Edinburgh to London on Tuesday, according to Flightradar24,
a tracking website.
Behind her three adult male
grandchildren walked V Adm Sir Tim Laurence, who is married to the Princess
Royal, and the Duke of Gloucester, the Queen’s cousin.
