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 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 symbolises 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.
In the next rank were two courtiers expected to play key roles for King Charles: Peter Loughborough, also known as Peter St Clair-Erskine, the 7th Earl of Rosslyn, a former police commander who was master of the household at Clarence House when the King was the Prince of Wales; and Clive Alderton, Charles’s principal private secretary, who has been in post since 2006 aside from a four-year stint as British ambassador to Morocco ending in 2015.
Unlike his siblings, who wore ceremonial military uniforms, the Duke of York, who became a “non-working royal” after the scandal of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein the convicted sex offender, wore a morning suit adorned with honours including the South Atlantic medal, a reminder of his military service in the 1982 Falklands war.
The King wore a uniform denoting the rank of field marshal, the highest in the British army. The Princess Royal, who said on Tuesday how “fortunate” she felt to be able to share “the last 24 hours of my dearest mother’s life” at Balmoral, wore a navy uniform with the rank of admiral. The Earl of Wessex wore the dress of an honorary royal colonel of the Royal Wessex Yeomanry.
