Edinburgh’s Royal Mile has been used as a place of processing for kings and queens for five hundred years, and no more movingly so than yesterday as, alongside his brothers and sister, His Majesty King Charles walked behind his mother’s coffin towards St Giles as she made her final journey through the city she loved so much, in the nation that had been for her, as King Charles said in the Scottish Parliament, “a haven and a home”. The crowds, thirty deep on each side of the pavement along most of the route, were almost entirely silent, each person paying their respects in their own way but united by grief.
There has been a quiet, reverent mood in Edinburgh over the past days, palpable from the moment I left Waverley station at lunchtime, punctuated only by the sounds of the gun salute fired from the Castle’s battlements. People have been pouring into the city from all over Scotland to pay their respects to Britain’s longest reigning monarch – as I write, more than twenty thousand are queuing to file through St Giles to bow their heads to our late Queen - as she lies at rest in Edinburgh’s cathedral, her coffin on its catafalque of Scottish oak, draped in the Royal Standard and bearing the Crown of Scotland.
Last Thursday’s news was so terribly sad. I know I’m not alone in having spent the days since reflecting on the Queen’s warmth, kindness and humour, on her quiet power and leadership, and on her exceptional gifts of diplomacy as well as her unwavering service to the country. She was such a tremendous role model, setting an incredible example with her grace and strength in difficult times and in good ones. I hope I always remember how much of an inspiration she has been to all of us, and how bright a beacon for Britain she has been in the world over a seventy year reign in which she was a constant, a north star during a period of such extraordinary change.
At a time when so much of the conversation about the relationship between the four nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has been about division, it has taken the death of a beloved Queen to remind us why our country is known as the United Kingdom. In conversations with friends and colleagues in the immediate aftermath of the news of her death, we took comfort from the fact she died in the place she loved best, surrounded by those she loved best. But for a Queen the personal is inescapably political, and as the days have worn on, the symbolic dimension of her dying here in Scotland, and of the journey her body has made from Balmoral to Holyrood and St Giles Cathedral, before drawing our gaze southwards as she travels towards her final resting place in Windsor, is not lost on me. In a more superstitious age we would see this as an unmistakable sign that we must use this time to heal the divisions, to come back together. To see that individually we can do little. Together, we can achieve everything. In our unity is our strength.
This period of National Mourning is an important one. It allows us to sit still with our grief, not only for her late Majesty, but for all those we have lost over the past few years – and to find peace and closure in the ancient rituals of our country, and to understand the symbolic potency of the immediate passing of the crown from one monarch to the next.
And in the words of another Queen of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots, in my end is my beginning.
Yours sincerely,
Chief Executive Officer, Walpole