Everything is measured down to the smallest detail.
At the precise moment when the death of Queen Elizabeth II was pronounced, the funeral arrangements were triggered, 70 years after the disappearance of the father of the late sovereign, George VI, carried away by a coronary thrombosis in February 1952. Since , the world has changed.
Just like the protocol.
The program for the days to come has already been rehearsed, timed and organized like a funeral ballet.
In short, nothing was left to chance.
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A ten-day interval
The funeral of Elizabeth II is expected in ten days, most likely on Monday, September 19.
But Buckingham Palace has not yet officially announced anything.
“The date of the funeral will be confirmed in due course”, he indicated, in a press release published this Friday morning, September 9, and quoted, among others, by
The Guardian
.
Until this ceremony, the royal residences will be closed to the public.
A national day of mourning
On D-Day, Big Ben will ring at 9 a.m., then a procession will guide the coffin from the Palace of Westminster to Westminster Abbey, reaching it at 11
a.m.
The Guardian
then describes a frozen country: the stock market will not open, the stores will lower their curtains, the stations will stop their announcements, the buses and cars will stop for a moment at the edge of the road.
At noon, not one, but two minutes of silence will be held across the country.
Moreover, the day will be declared a day of national mourning, but will not be a public holiday.
A filmed mass
The Archbishop of Canterbury will preside over the ceremony.
Until her death, the queen was indeed supreme governor of the Church of England, of which he is the spiritual leader.
The mass will be filmed, with cameras hidden behind painted brick shelters.
According to information from
Le Monde
, the coffin will be placed on a green cannon carriage which has already been used at the funerals of three previous sovereigns: George VI in 1952, George V in 1936 and Edward VII in 1910.
On video, when Queen Elizabeth II spoke in French
Hundreds of heads of state
Because it is a “state funeral”, where the burial of the Duke of Edinburgh was only referred to as “a royal funeral ceremony”, almost two thousand guests will be present.
If the names of those who will attend his funeral have not yet been formalized, they will probably be very numerous.
Members of the British Crown will obviously be present.
Starting with King Charles III and his wife Camilla;
Prince William, Kate Middleton and a priori their three children (George, Charlotte and Louis);
as well as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
For now, no one knows if Archie and Lilibet will accompany their parents to the ceremony.
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The Queen's other children will also be there: Princes Edward, Andrew and Princess Anne.
There is no doubt that their spouses and children will also attend the funeral.
Apart from the Windsors, all surviving British prime ministers will pay their last respects to Britain's most illustrious monarch.
Finally, a hundred heads of state will go to London, like Emmanuel Macron or Joe Biden.
Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has already warned that he had no plans to go to London.
A burial in Windsor
The sovereign will then be buried in the chapel of Windsor Castle, where her parents - King George VI and his wife Elizabeth - are already buried, as well as her younger sister Margaret, who died in 2002. She will rest alongside her husband Prince Philip , died on April 9, 2021 at the age of 99.
The cameras will then stop filming, and the gates will be closed.