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. She was dressed in a white dress and her wedding veil. 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. Items of jewellery placed on Victoria included the wedding ring of John Brown's mother, given to her by Brown in 1883.
State funeral . 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, and feature
white dress instead of black. 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". 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. Eight bay horses of the
Royal Horse Artillery were brought in from
Aldershot to draw the
funeral gun carriage at Osborne and at Windsor; but for the procession through London eight cream horses from the Royal Mews were used (the same eight as had drawn the late Queen's carriage at her
diamond jubilee). At Windsor, when the royal coffin was loaded on the gun carriage for the procession and the artillery horses took the weight,
Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, Victoria's granddaughter, said the day was very cold and "nothing in the world would make them start". An attendant Royal Guard from
HMS Excellent was soon ordered to haul the gun carriage instead, using the horses' harness and the
communication cord from the train. She further observed that the
Royal Artillery, responsible for the horses and the gun carriage, were "furious" and "humiliated" 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.
Funeral service The service, on 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. 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.
Lying-in-state and interment service 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 in
Windsor Great Park. 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. 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. ==Funeral guests==