I sat in the same spot for Diana’s funeral but the Queen’s was quite different, it went deeper
20.09.2022 - 01:41
/ msn.com
the members of the Royal family arrived - the Queen Consort moving with an attractive shyness as if she hoped no one would notice her; the Princess of Wales, veiled and graceful. Her children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, the latter almost covered by her black hat, tried sweetly to look grown-up. After the arrivals, suddenly there was silence.
All that could be seen through the open West Door was the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend David Hoyle, waiting, absolutely still. The distant drums and the sound of pipes stole upon us, the first evidence to our senses that there was a great procession outside. In this drama, the biggest actor had a non-speaking part - the coffin itself.
As the bearer party of Grenadiers edged it up the abbey steps, it became literally true that in the midst of life we were in death. Before it processed the pursuivants and heralds, the Queen’s Household, the clergy with their crosses raised high; just behind it, the King. In former days, his public face was much more expressive than his mother’s careful impassivity.
Now, it is acquiring the mask of command. Behind him, followed the chief members of his family – the Princess Royal, the most senior and stoical, the Duke of Sussex, the most uneasy. Placed just beneath the altar and above the quire, still carrying its flowers, the orb and sceptre and the Imperial Crown, the coffin dominated the proceedings.
It was the coffin, not the altar, that the Royal family - and the foreign royal families on its other side - sat and faced. What then played out was almost purely from the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible, with their unique mixture of beautiful cadences and astonishing directness. Some, perhaps, may have
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