A Royal Farewell to Diana, Tradition

It is easier, a grieving Britain has learned these last extraordinary few days, to bury a queen than a maverick princess.

A queen may go in solemn splendor to her rest when the state observes the rigorous precedent, protocol and seamless ceremony for which Britain is famous.

But if the late princess is Diana of Wales, ritual itself must be reinvented.

So it will be that Saturday’s funeral for Diana, which may draw the biggest crowd in London’s two-millennium history--and the history of television--will be without precedent in its relative simplicity and its significance.

It will be a hybrid ceremony symptomatic of a nation on the cusp of change.

To the delight of some British analysts and the dismay of others, Diana’s funeral signals more than farewell to a headstrong woman who would not play by traditional royal rules. For many, it also represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizens of a modern democracy and their ancient, aloof monarchy.

“This has become a genuinely revolutionary event. The starchy House of Windsor sort of monarchy known and loved for its elaborate protocol and militarized spectaculars was fine for a top-down state. Today it is irrelevant,” said constitutional expert David Starkey. “Diana rebelled. She represents other values, the touchy-feely Californization of Britain. To our astonishment, we discovered that we like those values better.”

There is no shortage of unrepentant traditionalists like Boris Johnson, appalled at the prospect of Diana becoming transformed into an uptown British version of Evita: “Many people, including many intelligent women, are infuriated by the Argentine peasant hagiography of the princess. We all know there was another side to the story,” said Johnson, an author and columnist.

In the vast public outpouring of grief, such voices are drowned by celebration of the new Britain that has seized London’s streets and the national psyche. “Modern Britain knows that, un-British or not, it is good to cry. The heaped flowers are intensely moving. So are the crowds. This is clearly becoming a populist event far beyond the reach of official control of the carefully graded rituals of monarchy,” said the Independent newspaper, which speaks for yuppie Britain.

In context, then, it is plain that this has not been an easy week for Buckingham Palace ceremonial planners. They serve under a retired army lieutenant colonel of the Scots Guards whose office firmly faces palace gardens--and the past. Part of the Lord Chancellor’s office, the planners organize garden parties, investitures and mistake-proof public ceremonies for the royals. The next funeral on their contingency list was one for Britain’s beloved 97-year-old Queen Mum.

If a reigning monarch had died, planning could have begun with the flick of a keyboard: protocol for the procession, precedence for the mourners, guest lists for the cathedral, order of route for the motorcade to the cemetery. It’s all spelled out.

With her divorce last year from Prince Charles, Diana, it was quickly noted, had lost her royal status and the title of her royal highness. She was not entitled, therefore, to the full trappings of a state occasion.

But perhaps some amalgam of a royal funeral, a state funeral and a ceremonial funeral . . . military bands, battalions of soldiers, frock-coated diplomats for the world’s most glamorous woman?

Preposterous.

“Ritual is extremely important in dealing with grief. But all that pomp and circumstance? Why should we behave as if it has gone on since 1066? Most of it was a 19th century invention,” said psychiatrist Martin Deahl.

Impetus for an observance that could effectively honor a modern, beloved royal rebel arose immediately after the shocked silence that greeted her death. First came the British people, voting massively, decisively, with their flowers in a public display of sorrow whose like the country has never known.

Then came Diana’s family, the Spencers. They are landed aristocrats almost as noble in lineage as the royal Windsors but infinitely more in touch, what with their normal lives, including jobs like Diana’s stint as a teenage kindergarten teacher. The Spencers had their own ideas about the funeral.

The royal family, locked in silent grief and isolation in a Scottish castle, may not have sensed the swelling tide at first. But young, rookie Prime Minister Tony Blair, a shrewd judge of public opinion, heard the petals falling.

The Spencer family and government officials quietly and quickly joined palace planners to create what they would call “a unique funeral for a unique person.” By some accounts, the palace writhed at what is described as Downing Street’s direct intervention favoring modernity over tradition.

Word seeped out: Diana’s funeral would have four clear, if potentially conflicting, objectives.

As a formal ceremony--a state funeral in everything but name--it would be dignified. But it would also be informal to reflect Diana’s personality. It would reflect the wishes of both the Spencers and the Windsors. And, finally, it would uphold tradition.

A bit like Beethoven doing the Beatles from the sound of it. But the new look should be readily apparent in all aspects of a ceremony expected to draw up to 6 million people on the streets of London and more than 2 billion television watchers around the globe.

In the procession, the service, and among the mourners, there will be some elements that are formal and stiff, traditionally British, quintessentially palace. And there will be a lot that is revolutionary.

Since being returned to Britain on Sunday from Paris, the body of Diana, 36, has lain before the altar in the Chapel Royal at historic St. James’ Palace--for centuries the home of British monarchs and still the statutory seat of government. That her body should not lie in state was apparently a decision made jointly by the royals and the Spencer family, and there has been quibbling over it.

“I think it is a great pity that the body shouldn’t be allowed to lie in state. It was a grave misjudgment to lock her away,” said the Rev. Donald Reeves, rector of St. James’ Church in Piccadilly.

Diana loyalists also objected that the “people’s princess” came home from France in a casket draped with the queen’s Royal Standard and not the Union Jack, the flag of a nation for which she was such a beloved, high-profile ambassador.

In a country whose view of itself has changed so dramatically and publicly in the past week, it will be instructive to see if Diana, who warred with the royal family, is carried to rest under the sovereign’s banner or the people’s flag.

“Feelings about the princess are intensely national, even proprietorial. The mass of people are determined to mourn her and make their feelings known,” said John Casey, a Cambridge University historian.

When ceremonialists still reigned, it was decided that Diana’s cortege would travel a well-trod one-mile route through the heart of official and ceremonial London to Westminster Abbey near the Thames, across from Big Ben and the houses of Parliament. By midweek, though, it had become clear to Blair after consultation with Charles that such a procession would not be long enough to accommodate the crowds.

Besides, everybody knows that ceremonial London was hardly the sort of place where Diana would have naturally gravitated on a Saturday morning.

As a result, the route was doubled. The Daily Telegraph, which is close to the royal family, said the change was the result of direct intervention by Charles, Diana’s divorced husband and father of her two sons.

Diana will be moved home tonight to flower-flooded Kensington Palace and the exclusive residential quarter where she lived. Beginning at 9:08 a.m. here Saturday, the first half of the procession will move through the streets of Kensington and Knightsbridge where Diana shopped and dined and roller-skated and took her royal sons to the movies. Then--tradition rewarded--comes the ceremonial mile.

The same dichotomy will be apparent in the funeral procession itself but reversed: first the old, then the new.

To bear one of the world’s most elegant women, Buckingham Palace has summoned an exquisitely inappropriate gun carriage. That is what ritual has always required. At least since 1910, when the carriage for a 13-pounder carried King Edward VII away.

Escorting the princess’ coffin will be a detachment of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, with seven black horses. The troopers will include a master saddler and a master farrier under the command of a cavalry captain. Sgt. Damien Gascoyne will ride the lead horse, army named “39-Henchman,” pulling the carriage. To their right, the sergeant and two riders behind him will each have a “hand horse,” riderless geldings in the gun team.

Behind them will probably walk: Diana’s sons, Prince William, 15, a likely future king, and his brother, Harry, who turns 13 this month; Charles; Diana’s brother, the earl of Spencer; and other relatives.

Soldiers from the Prince of Wales Company, 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, commanded by a highly decorated 28-year-old captain, flew to London on Thursday from their duty station in Northern Ireland. They will carry Diana’s coffin in and out of Westminster Abbey.

In the latter half of the princess’ funeral procession lies the revolution. Not more pomp and circumstance, but 500 representatives from 100 charities that Diana favored. What the Spencer family wants are the disabled and the blind, those with AIDS and land mine victims succored by Diana with such determination and affection.

When newspapers discovered that some charities intended to have their five senior directors march, looks that could kill lasered from Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. If there are no disabled children in wheelchairs in the procession, its purpose will have been defeated.

The family and the palace have also been in negotiations with the Right Rev. Arthur Wesley Carr, canon of Westminster Abbey, about the service itself. The drafty 13th century gothic cathedral, cavernous witness to so much of Britain’s ceremonial history, is a “Royal Peculiar,” which means that Carr does not report to any bishop but to Queen Elizabeth II directly in her role as head of the official Church of England.

For one royal funeral earlier this century, it took 21 tailors to cut and drape the black mourning cloths for use in the cathedral. This week, the old abbey has surrendered to many more television technicians than that. Inside the cathedral, the casket will lie on a catafalque before the altar with George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury, assisting Carr at a service that will be televised worldwide and on two huge screens in London’s Hyde Park.

Carr says the funeral will be “a rare opportunity for the abbey to bring together pageantry, history and the common touch,” but cautions that “it is difficult to be sensitive to the whole range of emotions and expectation. . . . One difficulty has been that the entire world wants to have a word in the order of the service.

“We should not forget that this is young death. There will be many young people in the congregation and outside who will feel depressed at the death of the princess. The feeling and the sentiment of the liturgy must capture that,” Carr said.

Blair will read from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, about the greatness of love. Diana’s sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale, will read the lessons, and Diana’s brother, Charles, will give a remembrance. The abbey’s choir will sing well-known hymns such as “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” performed at Diana and Charles’ wedding in 1981, and “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.” Soprano Lynne Dawson with the BBC Singers will perform a slice of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem,” one of Diana’s favorites.

Pop singer Elton John will sing “Candle in the Wind,” originally written about Marilyn Monroe with new lyrics dedicated to Diana. “Goodbye England’s rose; / may you ever grow in our hearts. . . .”

A key thread of uniqueness will be starkly apparent among mourners in the cathedral. Normally, for great affairs of state, the church is filled by what the British call “the great and the good”--shorthand for establishment figures and the upper class.

Not this princess.

At the insistence of the Spencer family, the 2,000 mourners will principally be everyday people whose lives were touched by Diana. Accordingly, palace planners turned not to the tried and true Diplomatic List, but, literally, to Diana’s Christmas card list. Genteelly murmuring diplomats have persuaded President Clinton and French President Jacques Chirac that their wives would be the better representatives of their nations.

The queen and her family, with Blair and four British former prime ministers, will be in the abbey, together with the father of Diana’s wealthy companion, Dodi Fayed. The younger Fayed was one of the three fatalities in the early morning crash in an underground road tunnel Sunday.

Guests invited by the family will include designers Catherine Walker and Valentino, singers George Michael, Sting and Shirley Bassey. Actor John Travolta will be there, dancer Wayne Sleep, photographer Mario Testino and Diana’s friends Rosa Monckton and Jemima and Imran Khan.

Ambassadors and senior British political, government and military officials will be in short supply. Robin Cook will be in the abbey less because he is Britain’s foreign minister than because he is as passionate against land mines as Diana was.

There has not been a whisper in the British press about the circuit-riding tribe of Euro-aristocrats who never miss a gig. Most of them aren’t invited--being a noble is not a passport for invitation here.

But Peter Hubble is going to the abbey. He is the manager of a jewelry store in Knightsbridge where Diana was a good customer over the past 11 years.

“She would come in quite often,” Hubble said. “I can’t say that I knew her incredibly well, but we used to joke and sometimes she would send me sweet little notes. . . . So lovely and warm. I guess she struck a lot of people like that. And then she died, and I said ‘Well, she’s gone. Nobody knows me now.’ But then an organizer called from the palace. ‘Would you be able to come?’ he asked. It was quite extraordinary. I felt humbled. I found myself literally shaking with emotion.”

It was a reaction shared by millions of other mourners in a nation that has suddenly been funneled into an exhilarating and dismaying spiral of emotion and self-discovery by a headstrong princess who died too young.