2,000 guests are due to attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral at Westminster Abbey

Pallbearers from the Queen’s Company, 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards prepare to carry Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin into Westminster Hall at the Palace of Westminster in London on Wednesday for interment after a procession from Buckingham Palace. Elizabeth’s funeral was held Monday.

LONDON – World leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden and the prime ministers of Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, will join members of the British royal family for Monday morning’s funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II inside Westminster Abbey, where she was married and subsequently crowned monarch more than 70 years ago.

The ceremony was also attended by senior religious figures, Britain’s past and present prime ministers and several other European monarchs, all paying tribute to Britain’s longest-reigning queen, who died Sept. 8 at the age of 96.

At the urging of Elizabeth’s son, King Charles III, the government declared the day a public holiday in Britain. The event will begin with her coffin walking a few hundred yards from Westminster Hall, where it has been lying in the oldest building in the British Parliament building.

The coffin will be carried by a horse-drawn gun carriage of the Royal Navy, alongside dozens of uniformed sailors. Members of Elizabeth’s family, including Charles and his eldest son, William, the new Prince of Wales, are likely to follow the casket procession.

About 2,000 guests will line the cathedral for the service, which will be presided over by the Dean of Westminster, David Hoyle, with a speech by Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, and a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Britain’s highest-ranking cleric.

Among other invited guests will be individuals honored by the Queen during her lifetime, including health workers who drew public praise during the pandemic.

The service will conclude with the moving British military bugle call, “The Last Post,” and a two-minute moment of silence, followed by a lament by the Queen’s personal piper, who plays the Scottish bagpipes outside her bedroom each morning. King Charles will place the battalion colors (regimental flag) of the Queen’s Company of the Grenadier Guards of the British Army Corps on his mother’s coffin.

After the state funeral service, her coffin will again be pulled behind a gun carriage all the way to Hyde Park Corner, a large crossroads between London’s larger Central Park and the back gardens of Buckingham Palace, with a triumphal arch in the middle commemorating the Duke of Wellington’s 1815 victory over Napoleon Bonaparte.

From there, the coffin will be transported by hearse to Windsor Castle – Elizabeth’s occasional childhood home during World War II and her final permanent home during her great illness.

A small ceremony for about 800 guests will follow in the castle chapel, where the physical symbols of her reign – the imperial crown, sphere and scepter – will be removed from her coffin. Later in the evening, her family will hold a private ceremony to lay her to rest, and her remains will be buried alongside those of her husband, the late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who died last year at the age of 99.

Elizabeth died almost on the other side of her kingdom, at her other residence, Balmoral, in northeast Scotland. In the days that followed, a series of ceremonies and traditional memorials stirred national grief; her coffin was transported to Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, where it lay in the city’s cathedral for local residents to pay their respects.

The coffin was then flown south to London, where it was guarded by members of the British military and others for several days while tens of thousands of mourners waited for hours before lining up to enter the more than 900-year-old Westminster Hall, where the coffin was placed.

The British aristocrat in charge of organizing the former monarch’s funeral – like his ancestors before him – was Edward William Fitzalan Howard, Duke of Norfolk. He said the British people should be proud of the way they paid tribute to Elizabeth during this period, when they “came together to acknowledge her extraordinary legacy.

https://www.purpleblue.org/2022/09/19/2000-guests-are-due-to-attend-queen-elizabeths-funeral-at-westminster-abbey/