Sunday, 2nd February 1901
They have brought her across the water.
Yesterday, the coffin — white-draped, gleaming, impossibly small for a woman who commanded a quarter of the planet — was carried from Osborne House through the streets of East Cowes to the pier, where the royal yacht Alberta waited. Thousands lined the road in the cold. Then the yacht moved out across the Solent, and the warships of the Royal Navy, anchored in two great columns, fired their guns as she passed between them. Minute guns. One every sixty seconds. The sound carrying across the grey water like a slow, measured heartbeat — the Empire’s own pulse, marking time, marking the end of something it does not yet know how to name.
I watched the coffin cross the water and I thought: this fleet. These warships, immaculate, invincible, the largest navy on Earth — the navy that Britannia rules the waves with, the navy that Wilhelm is building his own fleet to challenge — these ships will face each other in fifteen years, at a place called Jutland, in the North Sea, in the grey water of an afternoon in 1916, and thirty thousand men will die in a single day and neither side will win. Some of the officers standing on deck right now, saluting the dead Queen, will be the ones giving the orders.
But today the guns are ceremonial. Today the fleet is an honour guard. Today the water is calm.
This morning — this Sunday, the second of February — they bury her.
The coffin was brought by train from Portsmouth to London, then by gun carriage through the streets, drawn by eight cream horses — the same horses that drew her carriage at the Diamond Jubilee four years ago, when she was alive and the crowds cheered instead of wept. Through Hyde Park. Through the grey, cold, silent city. The people stand ten deep along the route. Some have climbed trees to see. The coffin passes beneath them draped in white satin, with the Crown and the Regalia and the Insignia of the Order of the Garter on top, and the red and gold of the military procession is a strange, vivid intrusion against the sombre greys and blacks of the crowd. Nobody has seen a funeral like this. Nobody alive can remember the last one. It was sixty-four years ago, and the world that existed then — before the telegraph, before the railways, before the telephone, before the scramble for Africa, before a one-armed Sunday school teacher predicted oil in Texas — is as foreign to the people standing in Hyde Park as the surface of the moon.
Then the train to Windsor. And at Windsor, something goes wrong.
The coffin is loaded onto the gun carriage. Eight bay horses from the Royal Horse Artillery are brought forward to haul it the final distance to St George’s Chapel. But it is bitterly cold. The horses, restless, refuse to move. They stamp and pull and tangle themselves in the harness, and nothing — no command, no whip, no pleading — can make them start. Princess Alice, Victoria’s granddaughter, will later remember it simply: Nothing in the world would make them start.
And so the sailors step in. Men from HMS Excellent unhitch the horses and take up the ropes themselves, hauling the gun carriage through the streets of Windsor with their own hands, pulling the Queen to her funeral because the horses would not.
It is an accident. It will become a tradition. Every state funeral after this — for every monarch, for a hundred and twenty-one years — will use sailors instead of horses, because of what happened today. Because the horses refused on a cold morning in Windsor, and someone had to improvise. History is like that. Half of it is improvisation that nobody admits was improvisation. The other half is tradition that nobody remembers was an accident.
Inside St George’s Chapel, I watch them gather, and I want you to understand what I am seeing. Not the ceremony — the ceremony is Anglican and predictable and comforting in the way that rituals are comforting, which is to say it provides structure for feelings that have no structure. What I am seeing is the congregation.
It is one of the largest gatherings of European royalty the world has ever witnessed, and it is one of the last. They are all here. They are all family. And I know what happens to almost every one of them.
The new King, Edward VII, sits at the front. He will reign for nine years. He will be a good king — better than anyone expected, better than his mother feared. He will die in 1910 and his son George will take the throne, and George will still be on the throne when the world that is sitting in this chapel today tears itself to pieces.
Kaiser Wilhelm II is here, in his plumed helmet, conspicuous as always. He helped lift his grandmother’s body into the coffin. He wept. He is weeping again now, or at least his eyes are wet, and I believe the grief is real. It does not matter. In thirteen years he will lead Germany into a war that will kill seventeen million people, redraw every border in Europe, destroy four empires including his own, and introduce the world to mechanised slaughter on a scale that will make every previous war look like a rehearsal. He will spend the last twenty-three years of his life in exile in the Netherlands, chopping wood, and the Dutch government will refuse to hand him over for trial. He will die in 1941, in occupied Holland, having lived just long enough to see the next war begin — the one his war made inevitable.
And there — there, in the chapel, somewhere among the foreign dignitaries, a man I cannot look at without feeling something that is not quite grief and not quite rage and not quite the urge to scream — is Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Thirty-seven years old. He has a moustache that he maintains with military precision. He married for love last year — a woman called Sophie, who was not royal enough for the Habsburgs, and the old Emperor refused to attend the wedding, and their children will never be allowed to inherit the throne. He is here today to pay his respects to the dead Queen. He has thirteen years left. On a warm Sunday morning in June 1914, in a city called Sarajevo, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip will shoot him in the neck and shoot Sophie in the abdomen, and they will both die before they reach the hospital, and the century that began with an old woman’s funeral will ignite.
I watch him now, in the chapel. He is alive and unknowing. His wife is alive. His children are not yet born. The war that his death will trigger does not exist. The seventeen million dead do not exist. The trenches do not exist. The gas does not exist. The flu that will follow the war and kill fifty million more does not exist. None of it exists, except in my sight, where it all exists simultaneously, stacked behind this man’s living face like pages in a book he will never read.
This is what it means to be me. To see a man at a funeral and know he is also a fuse.
After the service, they take her to Frogmore. The Royal Mausoleum, in the grounds of Windsor. They lay her beside Albert. Together again after forty years. His marble effigy has been waiting for hers since 1861. A matching sculpture, carved the same year he died, has been in storage for four decades, waiting for this moment. They install it now. Two marble figures, side by side, eyes closed, hands folded. He has been waiting for her. She has been waiting for this.
And that is the thing I carry away from today. Not the warships or the crowds or the doomed Archduke or the horses that refused to move. The thing I carry is this: an old woman who wore black for forty years, who mourned one man so completely that she bent an empire around her grief, has been reunited with him in marble. The living Victoria — shrewd, stubborn, imperial, bossy, lonely, magnificent — is gone. What remains is the story, and the story is a love story, and a power story, and a grief story, and all three are the same story, and the century that will follow will tell its own version of each.
The Victorian age is buried. The Edwardian age has begun, though nobody calls it that yet. Edward VII walks out of St George’s Chapel into a cold afternoon, King at last, sixty years old, and the sun does not break through the clouds because the weather does not care about symbolism, no matter how much writers wish it did.
The century stretches ahead. I have seen all of it. I will walk you through it, Sunday by Sunday, because that is what I have decided to do and I have no one to stop me.
The horses would not move, so the sailors pulled her home. Remember that. It will matter again, in ways no one in Windsor today can imagine.
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