With the formalization, Saturday September 10, by Buckingham Palace of the date of the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II – Monday September 19 at 11 a.m., in Westminster Abbey, London – a historic sequence has opened. . That of the slow procession of the Queen’s body to her final resting place – she will be buried alongside her parents, King George VI and the Queen Mother, in St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. That, too, of the gradual taking office of Charles III, who became king on the day of his death, September 8.
To give the measure of this considerable chain of events, the British authorities willingly cite the funeral of Winston Churchill, the first of Elizabeth II’s prime ministers, on January 30, 1965, which was attended, in the streets of London and at the television, by tens of millions of people. Or the London Olympics in 2012, whose opening ceremony was watched by 900 million people.
Media from around the world have started to converge on The Mall, the driveway leading to Buckingham Palace, and the royal communications department is overwhelmed with requests for credentials. Hundreds of thousands of Britons and tourists will also make the trip to experience these moments of national communion as closely as possible. The London authorities have begun to cordon off all the streets in the Westminster district, and to secure the surroundings of the Abbey and the Parliament, just opposite. The hotels are already taken by storm.
Considerable tails
Covered with the Royal Standard for Scotland (the flag of the crown of Scotland), the queen’s oak coffin left Sunday Balmoral, the summer residence in Aberdeenshire, where she died, for a first stay in Edinburgh , the capital of Scotland. He will be flown to London on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, he will be brought to Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster, used from the 12the century by the Norman kings as the seat of their administration. Adorned with the Imperial State Crown (the one the Queen wore when leaving Westminster Abbey on the day of her coronation), the coffin will be placed on a catafalque. The public will be able to come and gather at any time of the day or night, from Wednesday evening 5 p.m. until dawn on Monday, September 19.
This sequence, called the “lying in State”, should generate considerable queues. Prior to that of Elizabeth II, the coffins of her father and mother were also on public display at Westminster Hall. In 2002, more than 200,000 people lined up to gather for a few moments in front of the Queen Mother. The crowd should be even denser on September 19: it is the first time since the XVIIIe century that the funeral of a monarch takes place in Westminster. Those of Queen Victoria or George VI were held at Saint-Georges Chapel in Windsor.
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