Queen’s funeral – latest: King Charles ‘to have slimmed-down coronation’ amid cost-of-living crisis

The Independent’s editorial today predicts that the cost of living crisis “will present the greatest challenge to the nation and the monarchy in the coming years”. It states:

“In such divided times, King Charles will be faced with challenges sometimes even greater than those his mother had to contend with, not forgetting that the transcendent crisis of our times, the climate emergency, has hardly disappeared.

“He will be attacked for being “political”, and will need to take care not to be drawn into party politics. For some, even expressions of compassion or concern from him will be seized upon and twisted. His will be a treacherous path.

“Behind the scenes, in quiet audiences with political leaders – in nuanced, very carefully weighted public interventions – the King can follow the exemplary lead of his mother to remind the politicians of their own responsibilities, and the dangers and costs of national division.

“In the familiar formula laid down by the constitutional scholar Walter Bagehot in the 19th century, King Charles has the right ‘to be consulted, to encourage and to warn’. He has all of his training and the example of his mother to draw upon.”

Floral tributes to the Queen will be composted and given a new lease of life in planting projects throughout the Royal Parks.

It is expected that work to remove items laid by the public will begin on Monday, a week after the state funeral, and will continue for seven days.

Visitors will still be able to lay tributes but blooms which have already deteriorated will be moved to the Hyde Park nursery. Once taken away, any remaining packaging, cards and labels will be removed, before the plant material is composted in Kensington Gardens.

The compost will then be used on landscaping projects and shrubberies across the Royal Parks.

Queen Elizabeth II’s beloved horse, Carltonlima Emma, was at Windsor Castle yesterday as the late monarch’s coffin was brought in a procession to St George’s Chapel.

The fell pony was dressed in a black riding blanket, adorned with the Queen’s cipher, and had one of the Queen’s headscarves draped on her saddle.

The Queen previously wore the same scarf while riding Emma through Great Windsor Park, in photos obtained by the Daily Mail.

My colleague Meredith Clark has more details:

The immediate members of the late Queen’s family are well-known to most Britons, including her four children, eight grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.

However, there are a number of lesser-known royals who are the descendants of the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, as well as from her uncles and cousins.

My colleague Kate Ng takes a look at who they are, and how they are related to the Queen:

Any mother-child relationship is at least a little bit complicated. Add being the reigning monarch of the UK into the mix, and it becomes markedly more so, reports Rachel Burchfield.

Though Her Majesty loved her four children and they loved her – there is no question about that – the Queen’s number one responsibility in her lifetime was being the sovereign. That, combined with her patented stoicism, made motherhood complex.

A man who appeared to grab the flag draped over the Queen’s coffin planned to trespass at royal residences including Buckingham Palace because he did not believe she was dead, a court has heard.

Muhammad Khan, 28, allegedly left the queue in Westminster Hall on Friday night while the monarch was lying in state as the live feed briefly cut away.

Khan was arrested and appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, charged with two counts under the Public Order Act.

“The defendant had reached Westminster Hall. He was then seen by officers, who were present, to approach the coffin,” prosecutor Luke Staton said.

“He stepped off the carpet in the direction of the catafalque, then grabbed hold of the Royal Standard flag draped over the coffin with both of his hands.”

“The defendant did express the idea that the Queen is not dead and that he approached the coffin because he wanted to check for himself,” said Mr Staton.

The Queen’s funeral service at Westminster Abbey had an average TV audience of 26.2 million people across all channels, according to figures released by the research organisation Barb.

The service was broadcast simultaneously on a range of networks, including BBC One, BBC Two and BBC News; ITV along with ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4; and Sky News and Sky Sports.

A man who was made an MBE in the Queen’s last birthday honours says he is “forever grateful” at having the chance to attend her funeral.

John Frace, 27, from Dunoon in Argyll, said it was hard to put into words the experience of attending the funeral, after being one of 182 MBEs invited to the service.

He received the honour after creating his website, TravellingTabby, which translated often complicated and hard to read data sets about hospital admissions and deaths into easily understandable numbers.

Mr Frace, a former student at the University of the Highlands and Islands, said the late monarch had been a “constant, calm presence” in his life.

Celebrities joined the thousands of people who spent hours patiently standing in the line, which at one point reached a wait time of at least 24 hours.

Here’s a roundup of all the celebrities who waited their turn in the public queue:

Symbols of the monarchy that adorned the Queen’s coffin before her burial were fixed in place to avoid any unfortunate incidents in a long series of processions.

The Imperial State Crown, Sovereign’s Orb and Sceptre stayed with the Queen from her coronation until moments before her coffin was lowered into the ground in St George’s Chapel on Monday.

The royal relics, which are usually kept in the Tower of London, were placed on top of Her Majesty’s coffin for her lying-in-state, travelling from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey then on to Windsor.

Viewers of the funeral were puzzled by how the trio of objects, one of which is spherical, stayed in place throughout the journey.

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