The palace website will show a single-page announcement that is the same as the notice posted on the palace gate. Parliament will be recalled. All flags will be placed at half-staff and condolence books will be distributed throughout the country for anyone wishing to express their sympathy. If the queen does not die at Buckingham Palace, her body will be brought there as soon as possible after her death. The coffin will be placed in the throne room of Buckingham Palace to lie in state.
At 11 a. The Accession Council will hold a meeting to declare Charles king and will read a formal declaration to that end. After the proclamation is read, trumpets will sound and a gun salute will be fired off in Hyde Park near Buckingham Palace. The new king will then go on a four-day tour of the country, attending services and meeting his subjects. The queen will lie in state for four days at Buckingham Palace then will be moved to Westminster Hall to lie in state for another four days.
Moving the body to Westminster will involve a military parade. It will be 10 days of sorrow and spectacle in which, rather like the dazzling mirror of the monarchy itself, we will revel in who we were and avoid the question of what we have become. T he idea is for nothing to be unforeseen. If the Queen dies there, her body will come to London by car after a day or two.
The most elaborate plans are for what happens if she passes away at Balmoral, where she spends three months of the year. This will trigger an initial wave of Scottish ritual. Crowds are expected at level crossings and on station platforms the length of the country — from Musselburgh and Thirsk in the north, to Peterborough and Hatfield in the south — to throw flowers on the passing train. Another locomotive will follow behind, to clear debris from the tracks.
There will be an altar, the pall, the royal standard, and four Grenadier Guards, their bearskin hats inclined, their rifles pointing to the floor, standing watch. In the corridors, staff employed by the Queen for more than 50 years will pass, following procedures they know by heart.
There will be no time for sadness, or to worry about what happens next. Charles will bring in many of his own staff when he accedes. Outside, news crews will assemble on pre-agreed sites next to Canada Gate, at the bottom of Green Park. Special fibre-optic cable runs under the Mall, for broadcasting British state occasions. Everyone knows what to do. The 18th Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, will be in charge. Norfolks have overseen royal funerals since The current version of the plan is largely the work of Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Mather, a former equerry who retired from the palace in He declined to speak with me.
Someone will have the job of printing around 10, tickets for invited guests, the first of which will be required for the proclamation of King Charles in about 24 hours time. E veryone on the conference calls and around the table will know each other. For a narrow stratum of the British aristocracy and civil service, the art of planning major funerals — the solemnity, the excessive detail — is an expression of a certain national competence.
The first plans for London Bridge date back to the s, before being refined in detail at the turn of the century. Since then, there have been meetings two or three times a year for the various actors involved around a dozen government departments, the police, army, broadcasters and the Royal Parks in Church House, Westminster, the Palace, or elsewhere in Whitehall.
Participants described them to me as deeply civil and methodical. Arcane and highly specific knowledge is shared. The coffin must have a false lid, to hold the crown jewels, with a rim at least three inches high. In theory, everything is settled. But in the hours after the Queen has gone, there will be details that only Charles can decide. The Prince of Wales has waited longer to assume the British throne than any heir, and the world will now swirl around him at a new and uncrossable distance.
Switchboards — the Palace, Downing Street, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport — will be swamped with calls during the first 48 hours. The official advice, as it was last time, will be that business should continue as usual.
If the Queen dies during Royal Ascot, the meet will be scrapped. After the death of George VI in , rugby and hockey fixtures were called off, while football matches went ahead. Fans sang Abide With Me and the national anthem before kick off. The National Theatre will close if the news breaks before 4pm, and stay open if not. All games, including golf, will be banned in the Royal Parks. It advised stockpiling books of condolence — loose leaf, so inappropriate messages can be removed — to be placed in town halls, libraries and museums the day after the Queen dies.
Mayors will mask their decorations maces will be shrouded with black bags. In provincial cities, big screens will be erected so crowds can follow events taking place in London, and flags of all possible descriptions, including beach flags but not red danger flags , will be flown at half mast. The country must be seen to know what it is doing. The most recent set of instructions to embassies in London went out just before Christmas. One of the biggest headaches will be for the Foreign Office, dealing with all the dignitaries who descend from all corners of the earth.
Parliament will gather. In , the Commons convened for two minutes before noon. The house met again in the evening, when MPs began swearing the oath of allegiance to the new sovereign. Messages rained in from parliaments and presidents. The US House of Representatives adjourned. Ethiopia announced two weeks of mourning. In the House of Lords, the two thrones will be replaced by a single chair and a cushion bearing the golden outline of a crown.
In theory, all current members of the Privy Council, from Jeremy Corbyn to Ezekiel Alebua, the former prime minister of the Solomon Islands, are invited — but there is space for only or so. In , the Queen was one of two women present at her proclamation. After Charles has spoken, trumpeters from the Life Guards, wearing red plumes on their helmets, will step outside, give three blasts and the Garter King of Arms, a genealogist named Thomas Woodcock, will stand on the balcony and begin the ritual proclamations of King Charles III.
In , four newsreel cameras recorded the moment. This time there will be an audience of billions. The band of the Coldstream Guards will play the national anthem on drums that are wrapped in black cloth.
The proclamations will only just be getting started. A gun salute — almost seven minutes of artillery — will be fired from Hyde Park. There will be cocked hats and horses everywhere.
One of the concerns of the broadcasters is what the crowds will look like as they seek to record these moments of history. On the old boundary of the City of London, outside the Royal Courts of Justice, a red cord will hang across the road. The City Marshal, a former police detective chief superintendent named Philip Jordan, will be waiting on a horse.
The heralds will be formally admitted to the City, and there will be more trumpets and more announcements: at the Royal Exchange, and then in a chain reaction across the country. Sixty-five years ago, there were crowds of 10, in Birmingham; 5, in Manchester; 15, in Edinburgh. High Sheriffs stood on the steps of town halls, and announced the new sovereign according to local custom.
In York, the Mayor raised a toast to the Queen from a cup made of solid gold. The same rituals will take place, but this time around the new king will also go out to meet his people. There will also be civic receptions, for teachers, doctors and other ordinary folk, which are intended to reflect the altered spirit of his reign.
But from another city each day, there will be images of the new king mourning alongside his subjects, assuming his almighty, lonely role in the public imagination. F or a long time, the art of royal spectacle was for other, weaker peoples: Italians, Russians, and Habsburgs. British ritual occasions were a mess. At the funeral of Princess Charlotte, in , the undertakers were drunk. The clergy got lost in the words; the singing was awful; and the royal jewellers made the coronation ring for the wrong finger.
Courtiers, politicians and constitutional theorists such as Walter Bagehot worried about the dismal sight of the Empress of India trooping around Windsor in her donkey cart. If the crown was going to give up its executive authority, it would have to inspire loyalty and awe by other means — and theatre was part of the answer.
Obsessed by death, Victoria planned her own funeral with some style. But it was her son, Edward VII, who is largely responsible for reviving royal display. He turned the state opening of parliament and military drills, like the Trooping of the Colour, into full fancy-dress occasions, and at his own passing, resurrected the medieval ritual of lying in state. Hundreds of thousands of subjects filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall in , granting a new sense of intimacy to the body of the sovereign.
By , George V was a national father figure, giving the first royal Christmas speech to the nation — a tradition that persists today — in a radio address written for him by Rudyard Kipling.
The shambles and the remoteness of the 19th-century monarchy were replaced by an idealised family and historic pageantry invented in the 20th. The Queen, by all accounts a practical and unsentimental person, understands the theatrical power of the crown.
And there is no reason to doubt that her funeral rites will evoke a rush of collective feeling. It will be all about her, and it will really be about us. There will be an urge to stand in the street, to see it with your own eyes, to be part of a multitude. The cumulative effect will be conservative.
The wave of feeling will help to swamp the awkward facts of the succession. Following her departure from London last March, the Queen urged the country to unite and said that everyone had a role to play in the coming days and months to tackle the pandemic.
I am certain we are up to that challenge. You can be assured that my family and I stand ready to play our part.
On March 22 , it was widely reported that the Queen was planning to give a rare televised address to the nation on coronavirus. The monarch was thought to have been liaising with the Government on the timing for the speech.
Apart from Her Majesty's annual Christmas day address, the last time she made a similar speech was in , following her mother's funeral. She also made rare a rare speech in after the death of the late Princess Diana and on the topic of the Gulf War in The family has since returned to their London home, Kensington Palace. As per tradition, a footman in mourning clothes will walk out of Buckingham Palace and pin a black-edged notice to the gates. An easel announcing the death of the Duke was placed outside of Buckingham Palace following his passing on April 9, Newsreaders will be expected to wear black suits and ties which they keep on standby with them at all times.
Pilots are also expected to announce the death during their flights and all comedy TV shows will not be shown until after her funeral. Flags will fly at half-mast across the UK as was the case when the Duke of Edinburgh died too and it has been rumoured for several years that workers would be sent home early. While this is yet to be confirmed, the public have been advised in over the last year to work from home, where possible, so it is presumed that a large proportion of the work force will already be at home.
The Archbishop of Canterbury will be in charge of funeral proceedings. Previously, this was the case so that the public could pay their respects. However, according the UK guidance during Covid, individuals are advised to avoid large and small gatherings in public spaces so it is likely that the measures surrounding a state funeral would have to be amended.
Given that social distancing measures and lockdown restrictions in the UK have eased and lifted, respectively, it's likely the Queen would have a state funeral.
It's believed the state funeral would be held at Westminster Abbey, London and would include a procession in London and Windsor and a nationwide two minutes' silence at midday. On the day of the funeral, the London Stock Exchange will close.
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