Sole rehearsal for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral was ‘comedy of errors’

The only rehearsal for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral had a band at the wrong start point, a Gentleman at Arms nearly crushed at Marble Arch and “everything that could go wrong … go wrong”, a new biography on King Charles has said.

The journalist Robert Hardman wrote about the chaos behind the preparations for the state procession in his book, Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story. “It was a comedy of errors,” said Garrison Sergeant Major “Vern” Stokes, who was responsible for the military and ceremonial aspects of the funeral.

Organisers only had time for one full rehearsal before the actual event, running through the entire procession four days prior in the early hours of darkness. The preparations were “out of step” from the start, insiders told Hardman.

The front of the procession had separated from the coffin – organisers quickly learned that the guardsman and the Royal Navy recruit carrying the two-tonne gun carriage had different required step speeds. One of the Gentlemen at Arms – the monarch’s bodyguards – then went the wrong way and was nearly crushed between the gun carriage and Wellington Arch.

“It was a minor miracle there were no major glitches on the funeral day itself,” Hardman wrote. But the state procession that unfolded on 19 September 2022 went smoothly. The Queen’s coffin made its short journey from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey on a Victorian state gun carriage pulled by 142 naval ratings and pushed forth by the music of 200 pipers and drummers.

The military procession that escorted her coffin past London’s landmarks to Wellington Arch was so long that as its front reached Whitehall, its rear still stretched up Victoria Street. At Wellington Arch, military personnel successfully performed a royal salute to send the queen to the state hearse that would take her to her final resting place – next to the Duke of Edinburgh at the George VI Memorial Chapel, Windsor.

An estimated 250,000 people queued to see the queen’s coffin while she lay in state at Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster. The queue stretched back 10 miles – seven miles from Westminster to Southwark Park, and then a three-mile snaked line inside the park itself.