The Queen’s coffin will be carried to Westminster Abbey on a 123-year-old gun carriage towed by 98 Royal Navy sailors, in a tradition dating back to the funeral of Queen Victoria.
On the day of Victoria’s funeral in 1901, her coffin was to be carried on the gun carriage through the streets of Windsor but, in the bitter cold of that February day, the horses which were going to pull it panicked and reared, threatening to topple the coffin from the carriage.
