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Date | 2 February 1901 |
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Location | St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle (official ceremony) |
Participants | British royal family and members of various other royal houses |
Burial | Frogmore Mausoleum, Windsor Great Park (resting place) |
The state funeral of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, occurred on 2 February 1901, after her death on 22 January. It was one of the largest gatherings of European royalty.
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, [1] and feature white dress instead of black. [2] 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. [3] She was dressed in a white dress and her wedding veil. [4] 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. [1] [5] Items of jewellery placed on Victoria included the wedding ring of John Brown's mother, given to her by Brown in 1883. [1] Her funeral was held on Saturday, 2 February, in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and after two days of lying-in-state, she was interred beside Prince Albert in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore at Windsor Great Park. [6]
The state funeral of Queen Victoria took place in February 1901; it had been 64 years since the last burial of a monarch. 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, 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. [10]
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. [11]
Other descendants of the late Queen's paternal grandfather, King George III and their families:
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