WINDSOR (UK) – Queen Elizabeth will bid a final farewell to Prince Philip, at a ceremonial funeral on Saturday.
There will be just 30 mourners inside St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle for the funeral service due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“She’s the queen, she will behave with the extraordinary dignity and extraordinary courage that she always does. And at the same time, she is saying farewell to someone to who she was married for 73 years,” said Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who will help officiate at the service.
“I think there will be tears in many homes because other names will be on their minds, faces they’ve lost that they don’t see again, funerals they couldn’t go to as many haven’t been able to go to this one because it is limited to 30 in the congregation,” he said. “That will break many a heart.”
He called on the British public to pray for the monarch.
Army bands, Navy pipers and Royal Marine buglers will take part, while his coffin will be taken from its resting place inside the castle to the chapel on the back of a specially-converted Land Rover, which he helped design himself.
At 1400 GMT, before the service starts, there will be a minute’s silence.
The congregation won’t have political figures such as Prime Minister Boris Johnson in attendance.
The couple’s second son Prince Andrew has said his mother was being stoical in the face of a loss that she had described as “having left a huge void in her life”.
“It’s a great loss,” he said. “I think the way I would put it is, we’ve lost almost the grandfather of the nation.”
