And so she returns, for the last time, to the city that was her home for the better part of a century; the headquarters of her reign for 70 years; and her portal to the world as, under her guidance, the modern monarchy became, in its reach, a truly global phenomenon.
This evening, the coffin of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will depart Edinburgh in an RAF aircraft, accompanied by the Princess Royal and her husband, Vice-Admiral Sir Tim Laurence. From RAF Northolt, the State Hearse will convey the coffin to Buckingham Palace, where it will rest in the Bow Room overnight before being taken tomorrow to Westminster Hall. There, it will lie in state until the funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday.
Already, queues are forming in central London as mourners from all over the UK — and from other countries — line up to pay their respects, facing waiting times of up to 35 hours. Sir Mark Rowley, the new Met Commissioner, says the scale of this pilgrimage to the heart of the capital represents “a massive challenge”: an estimated 10,000 police officers will be on duty, with 1,500 military personnel on hand to assist. In private, senior police officers expect the crowds to exceed those that descended upon London in the aftermath of the death of Diana in 1997.
It is apt that it should be so. Though the Queen was known to love Balmoral and Windsor Castle (where she will be buried) best, Buckingham Palace was the residence most associated with her reign, and with the reassuring constancy that she represented to her people. In a more general sense, her presence in London was essential to its post-war rebirth. In his magisterial biography of the city, Peter Ackroyd describes her coronation in 1953 as one of the “great set-pieces of London theatre”, a glorious ritual that did much to nurture the “sense of London as a successful and enthusiastic community, miraculously reassembled after the war.”
Across every sector of London life, her public service was remarkable. For centuries, the links between the monarchy and the City of London have been strong — it was at the Royal Exchange that her son was proclaimed King Charles III on Saturday — and the Queen strengthened them significantly, always supportive of its growth as a global financial centre.
On Thursday night, the lights dimmed in the West End in recognition of her patronage of the arts in the city. She and her late husband, Prince Philip, adored musicals — especially Oklahoma! — but the Queen was a constant presence in all aspects of London’s cultural life: at the Royal Ballet, the Royal National Theatre, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and 35 Royal Variety performances.
As for sport, it is said, perhaps apocryphally, that she supported Arsenal. Her spoof parachute jump into the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics is a memory for the ages. But — as Lord Coe revealed on Friday — the success of London’s bid also owed much to the greeting extended by her to the International Olympic Committee at Buckingham Palace. She was, as Lord Coe put it, “the ace in the pack”.
In a near-mythic sense, too, London was the stage upon which the majesty and spectacle of her reign was played out. She received 114 state visits by world leaders, each of them turning the Mall into a vivid avenue of pomp and pageantry. Her jubilee celebrations — especially the Diamond and Platinum festivities in 2012 and 2022 — transformed the area around the Victoria Memorial into a joyous amphitheatre.
Now, as it was after the deaths of her father, George VI, in 1952, of Diana 25 years ago and of the Queen Mother in 2002, London will be a city of royal mourning.
Grief does not readily translate into metrics but the signs are clear that the coming days will be quite extraordinary in intensity, magnitude and a sense of what the King, addressing Parliament yesterday, called “the weight of history”. Already, the diversity of the crowds converging upon the city gives the lie to the notion the Queen was admired only by the old, the privileged and those who hankered after the imperial past.
London, more than any part of the realm, encapsulated the multitudinous variety of her reign: its drama, its energy, its blend of ancestral tradition and bright modernity. A great city awaits the greatest of monarchs to bid a final farewell, and to pay tribute to a sovereign who was also a truly beloved Londoner.
