On Wednesday, the coffin will be taken on a gun carriage as part of a grand military procession to Westminster Hall, where a period of lying in state will begin until the funeral on Monday.
Members of the public will be allowed to walk past the coffin for 24 hours a day until the morning of the funeral, which will be attended by dozens of world leaders including US President Joe Biden.
RECONCILIATION
As part of the highly choreographed days of mourning, King Charles is also travelling to the four parts of the United Kingdom.
Thousands of well-wishers greeted him in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, with handshakes, smiles and warm words as he walked along lines of people crowding the streets outside Hillsborough Castle, the monarch’s official residence in the province.
The visit was laden with political significance given Britain’s historical record in Ireland and the more recent years of violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.
At a ceremony at Hillsborough Castle, the acting speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Alex Maskey, paid fulsome tribute to the queen.
“Queen Elizabeth was not a distant observer in the transformation and progress of relationships in, and between, these islands,” said Maskey, a member of Sinn Fein, which seeks the reunification of Ireland.
“She personally demonstrated how individual acts of positive leadership can help break down barriers and encourage reconciliation,” he said.
Maskey, who was interned by the authorities as an Irish Republican Army suspect in the 1970s, said Charles had already shown he understood the importance of reconciliation and was committed to it.
In 2011, Elizabeth became the first British monarch to visit the Irish Republic since independence from London almost a century earlier.
Although a potent symbol of the union, she made powerful gestures of reconciliation for Britain’s bloody past in Ireland during the state visit, culminating in a speech in which she expressed regret for centuries of conflict.
A year after her visit to Ireland, the queen, whose cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten was killed by the IRA in 1979, shook the hand of former IRA commander and then Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness in Belfast.
It was a milestone in a peace process that largely brought an end to three decades of violence between pro-British, largely Protestant, factions and nationalists, mostly Catholic, seeking to reunite Ireland and Northern Ireland.
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