The British ritual of state funerals, an opportunity to strengthen the legitimacy of the monarchy

Buckingham Palace tuned the ceremony to the minute. At 6.30 a.m. on Monday, September 19 in London, the doors of Westminster Hall closed for good behind the last people from the public who had come to pay their respects to the coffin of Elizabeth II, which had been on display for four days, ending a queue epic became the attraction of media around the world. At 10:35 a.m., the coffin was taken from the venerable medieval building to Westminster Abbey, where a mass was celebrated in the presence of hundreds of foreign dignitaries. At 11:55 a.m., the service ended with the ringing of the dead, followed by two minutes of silence. At noon, the Queen’s official piper, Major Paul Burns, intoned a final lament.

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London was packed with people – a million people are expected to come to the center of the British capital. A new procession, with hundreds of soldiers, Charles III, his sons and part of the royal family on foot, stretched to Wellington’s Arch, at the entrance to Hyde Park, from where the coffin had been loaded into a hearse to be taken to Windsor, west London. There, finally, a last procession will be followed by a more intimate mass in the chapel of Saint-George. The Queen’s entombment is scheduled for 7:30 p.m., to the left of the nave, near the vaults of her husband, Prince Philip (who died in 2021), her parents, King George VI and the Queen Mother, and from the ashes of his younger sister, Margaret.

Over a billion viewers

This scholarly unrolled has been prepared for years. The state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II promises to be a global event: more than a billion people could follow it behind their screens. The British monarchy no longer has more than a symbolic constitutional power but remains a master in the art of organizing these very ritualised, seemingly immutable moments. Through their extraordinary pomp, their solemnity, state funerals are a rare opportunity to deploy one’s prestige, and aim to reinforce its legitimacy and longevity.

“These funerals are a unique moment to build consensus, while the royal family has not always been consensual or popular”, decrypts the historian John Wolffe, professor of religious history at the Open University. The royal family has taken care, in recent days, to avoid hiccups as much as possible. The Prince and Princess of Wales and the Sussexes, who have been estranged for months, waved to concert crowds in Windsor earlier this week. And Harry was able to wear military dress for his grandmother’s coffin wake at Westminster Hall on Saturday. He had been theoretically deprived of it, after his departure for the United States.

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