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eeked of joss sticks and from out of the walls came the muffled sound of scratchy piped
music. The male servants wore the scarlet and black livery of Elizabeth’s own footmen
at home and on the hall table lay a red box marked ‘The King’.
The Duke died nine days later in the early hours of 28 May 1972. Three days later his
body was flown by the RAF to Britain and on 1 June he lay in state in St George’s
Chapel. Sixty thousand mourners filed past over the following two days, not a bad total
for an ex-King whose reign had ended nearly forty years before. The Duchess arrived on
the second day to stay at Buckingham Palace. Mountbatten was deputed to meet her at
the airport and found her extremely nervous at having to confront the entire royal
family without her husband’s support. She was ‘particularly worried about Elizabeth, the
Queen Mother, who, she said, never approved of her’. Mountbatten assured her that she
had nothing to worry about. ‘Your sister-in-law will receive you with open arms,’ he
declared with his customary hyperbole. ‘She is so deeply sorry for you in your present
grief and remembers what she felt like when her own husband died.’ He took her to her
husband’s lying-in-state at Windsor. ‘At the end she stood again looking at the coffin’, he
recalled, ‘and said in the saddest imaginable voice: “He was my entire life. I can’t begin
to think what I am going to do without him, he gave up so much for me, and now he has
gone. I always hoped I would die before him.”’ 10 Charles, who was also there, does not
seem to have heard this moving speech. At dinner at Buckingham Palace, he had found
the Duchess’s behaviour decidedly odd and wondered ‘what sort of strain she was
suffering under – whether all the social chatter was part of a brilliant façade or whether
she was really like that all the time and didn’t really notice Uncle David’s departure’. At
Windsor, beside the coffin, ‘she kept saying “He gave up so much for so little” – pointing
at herself with a strange grin’. 11
The funeral service took place on Monday, 5 June, at St George’s Chapel, Windsor; 3
June had been the Queen’s official birthday which is traditionally celebrated by the
ceremony of Trooping the Colour with all its accompanying panoply of guardsmen in
uniforms and huge black bearskins, and the Sovereign riding her charger side-saddle to
the accompaniment of regimental brass bands. There had been an awkward moment
when the question had arisen as to whether it should be cancelled as a mark of respect,
as it certainly would have been had the Duke still been a reigning sovereign. Elizabeth
and her advisers were reluctant to do so and a compromise was reached by which the
ceremony went ahead but a lament was played by pipe bands, an effective tribute to the
Duke who had been an enthusiastic piper himself. At Windsor the funeral was performed
with the state befitting an ex-King. The officiating priests were the Archbishops of
Canterbury and York, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland and the Dean of
Windsor. The entire royal family was there except for the Duke of Gloucester, who was
too ill to attend. Few foreign royalties apart from King Olav V of Norway, a close
relation, had, however, made the effort to be at the funeral ceremony of one who, in
royal terms, had betrayed his class. There was a handful of his English friends. Garter
King of Arms proclaimed the dead man’s high-sounding titles: Knight of the Garter, of
the Thistle, of St Patrick, Knight Grand Cross of many chivalric orders, once King