| Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria | |
| Participants: | British royal family and members of various other royal houses |
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India, died on 22 January 1901 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, at the age of 81. At the time of her death, she was the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Her state funeral took place on 2 February 1901, being one of the largest gatherings of European royalty.
On 25 January, her body was lifted into the coffin by her sons Edward VII and Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and her grandson the German Emperor Wilhelm II.[1] She was dressed in a white dress and her wedding veil.[2] An array of mementos commemorating her extended family, friends and servants were laid in the coffin with her, at her request, by her doctor and dressers. A dressing gown that had belonged to her husband Albert, who had died 40 years earlier, was placed by her side, along with a plaster cast of his hand, while a lock of John Brown's hair, along with a picture of him, was placed in her left hand concealed from the view of the family by a carefully positioned bunch of flowers.[3] Items of jewellery placed on Victoria included the wedding ring of John Brown's mother, given to her by Brown in 1883.[4]
The state funeral of Queen Victoria took place on Saturday, 2 February 1901, in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle; it had been 64 years since the last burial of a monarch.
In 1897, Victoria had written instructions for her funeral, which was to be military as befitting a soldier's daughter and the head of the army,[5] and feature white dress instead of black.[6] Victoria left strict instructions regarding the service and associated ceremonies and instituted a number of changes, several of which set a precedent for state (and indeed ceremonial) funerals that have taken place since. First, she disliked the preponderance of funereal black; henceforward, there would be no black cloaks, drapes or canopy, and Victoria requested a white pall for her coffin. Second, she expressed a desire to be buried as "a soldier's daughter".[7] The procession, therefore, became much more a military procession, with the peers, privy counsellors and judiciary no longer taking part en masse. Her pallbearers were equerries rather than dukes (as had previously been customary), and for the first time, a gun carriage was employed to convey the monarch's coffin. Third, Victoria requested that there should be no public lying in state. This meant that the only event in London on this occasion was a gun carriage procession from one railway station to another: Victoria having died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, her body was conveyed by boat and train to Victoria Station, then by gun carriage to Paddington Station and then by train to Windsor for the funeral service itself. The rare sight of a state funeral cortège travelling by ship provided a striking spectacle: Victoria's body was carried on board HMY Alberta from Cowes to Gosport, with a suite of yachts following conveying the new king, Edward VII, and other mourners. Minute guns were fired by the assembled fleet as the yacht passed by. Victoria's body remained on board ship overnight before being conveyed by gun carriage to Gosport railway station the following day for the train journey to London. Victoria broke convention by having a white draped coffin.
At Windsor, when the royal coffin was loaded atop the gun carriage for the procession and the artillery horses took the weight, granddaughter of Queen Victoria Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone said the day was very cold and "nothing in the world would make them start". An attendant Royal Guard from HMS Excellent was shortly then ordered to haul the gun carriage with ropes instead,[8] a disruption which subsequently became state funeral tradition.[9] She further observed that the Royal Artillery, responsible for the horses and the gun carriage, "were furious... humiliated beyond words" by the incident.
Victoria's children had married into the great royal families of Europe and a number of foreign monarchs were in attendance, including Wilhelm II of Germany as well as the heir-presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand.[10]
The service in the afternoon of Saturday 2 February at St George's Chapel followed the liturgy of the Burial Service in the Book of Common Prayer and was the first royal funeral for which a printed order of service had been produced. The organisation of the service lay with the Dean of Windsor and the Lord Chamberlain, with the active participation of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.[11] The music started with the first of the funeral sentences by William Croft and Psalm 15 to a setting by William Felton. After the lesson came further funeral sentences sung as anthems; Man that is born by Samuel Sebastian Wesley and Thou knowest Lord by Henry Purcell. The Lord's Prayer in Latin by Charles Gounod, and the anthem How blest are they by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky followed. After the Garter Principal King of Arms had proclaimed the Queen's styles and titles, the anthem Blest are the departed by Louis Spohr was reportedly followed by the Dresden amen. The inclusion of so much music by foreign composers was unprecedented and was not repeated in later royal funerals where British music predominated. At the end of the service, a funeral march attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven but actually by Johann Heinrich Walch was played instead of the traditional "Dead March" from Saul because Victoria was known to dislike Handel's music and was reported to have forbidden its use at her funeral.[12]
After the funeral service in St George's Chapel, Queen Victoria's body lay in state there for two days, under a military guard, before joining that of Prince Albert in the nearby Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore at Windsor Great Park.[13] The interment at the Frogmore Mausolem took place on 4 February. The procession from St George's Chapel was accompanied by massed military bands playing funeral marches, but in the final part of the journey, pipers played a lament, the Black Watch Dead March. Arriving at the mausoleum, the choir of St George's sang Yea, though I walk from Sir Arthur Sullivan's oratorio, The Light of the World. This was followed by the funeral sentences by Wesley and Purcell that had been sung at the funeral, Lord have mercy by Thomas Tallis and Gounoud's Lord's Prayer. A hymn, Sleep thy last sleep, preceded the concluding prayers read by the Dean of Windsor, after which Sullivan's anthem, The face of death and Sir John Stainer's Sevenfold Amen concluded the service.[14]
A tomb effigy of Victoria had been sculpted by Baron Carlo Marochetti in 1861 as a companion piece to his marble effigy of Prince Albert. Victoria's sculpture was finally installed next to Albert's in the mausoleum later in 1901.[15]
The list below is from a report in The London Gazette.
Princess and Prince Charles of Denmark, the late Queen's granddaughter and grandson-in-law
The King of the Belgians, the late Queen's first cousin The Crown Prince of Denmark (representing the King of Denmark)
The Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway (representing the King of Sweden and Norway)
The Crown Prince of Siam (representing the King of Siam)