ABSTRACT
Historians or royal biographers who have written on ceremonial at the time of a royal death in England have generally misunderstood the nature of the proceedings, not only in their details but their broader significance as well. Two of the most recent royal biographies 1 have failed to grasp the basic distinction that existed by the late seventeenth century in England between the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ as they related to royal funeral ceremonial. To be sure, both the funeral of Charles II (1685) and Queen Anne (1714) were designated as private funerals, but this did not mean they were of a secret nature. An examination of royal funeral ceremonial over a broad chronological sweep from the beginning of the Tudor until the end of the Georgian eras will demonstrate that the distinction is an heraldic one, referring primarily to the ‘degree’ of ceremony to be used. This was first pointed out several years ago by Sir Anthony Wagner in his monumental study, Heralds of England. 2 An understanding of royal funeral ceremony in this wider context of time reveals not only the complexity involved in arranging such ceremonies, but demonstrates that between these dates such ceremony underwent a profound change. By the year 1830 the spectacle of the great public funeral—with its enormous procession, numbering a cast of well over a thousand, with its magnificent chariot bearing the coffin with its life-like effigy of the deceased monarch, with the hearse or mausoleum beneath which the body was placed for the funeral service itself—had gone. All this had given way to a much simpler and greatly scaled down form of earlier ceremonial. The public funeral under the direction of the Earl Marshal all but disappeared. The only symbol of sovereignty that remained as part of the procedure was the use on top of the coffin of either the real crown or a replica of it. The great heraldic public funeral was, by the end of the seventeenth century, retained only for the funerals of prominent military and political heroes such as the Duke of Marlborough (1722), the Earl of Chatham (1778), Lord Nelson (1806), and the Duke of Wellington (1852). In this change from ‘public’ to ‘private’, while the Officers of the College of Arms argued for the maintenance of the appropriate precedents, it was a wide range of personal, political, and economic considerations that determined the final form for any particular royal funeral.
