What to expect at the Queen's funeral

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Queen Elizabeth's funeral on Monday will follow an elaborate and precisely detailed plan — one the monarch will have signed off on herself.

More than 2,000 people are expected inside Westminster Abbey in central London for the hour-long service, which will begin precisely — as royal events do — at 11 a.m. local time (6 a.m. ET) and be broadcast to an audience around the world.

At its heart is the traditional Church of England funeral service, along with elements of military pomp and circumstance that find their roots in how Queen Victoria wished to have her funeral unfold more than a century ago.

Still, there is the potential for surprise, whether in the music, the readings or something else the Queen — who died on Sept. 8, at the age of 96 — might have thought of as she planned for the inevitable day.

"She would have listened to advice, she'll have taken input from her children, but essentially hers will have been the final voice," Judith Rowbotham, a social and cultural scholar and visiting research professor at the University of Plymouth in southwestern England, said in an interview.

Elizabeth's funeral is the first for a monarch in Westminster Abbey since 1760, a fact Rowbotham attributes to the sheer scale of the event, and how it just wouldn't have been possible in the more frequent — and recent — locale for royal funerals, St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, west of London.

"Simply to get in the representatives of the Armed Forces, the reserves, all the organizations with which the Queen has been associated … then this huge phalanx of visiting Commonwealth leaders, members of princely families from across Europe who are related, things like that — you couldn't accommodate them in Windsor and then in St. George's Chapel."

Much speculation has circulated around just who will be inside the abbey. Canada will have a delegation (more on that below), and numerous world leaders are confirmed to be attending.

Some will reportedly travel together to the service from a location a few kilometres away to ease the potential for congestion around the historic church, but at least one leader will reportedly make his own way there: U.S. President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, are expected to arrive in the Beast, his heavily armoured limousine.

The main pomp and ceremony of Monday's events begins at 10:44 a.m. local time (5:44 a.m. ET), when a procession to carry the coffin from Westminster Hall to the abbey will begin. Senior members of the Royal Family are expected to walk behind as the casket is transported on a gun carriage pulled by navy sailors. 

The fact that there will be such military pomp goes back to the time of Victoria, who died in 1901 and who, Rowbotham says, wanted to avoid the way in which previous royal funerals had unfolded.

When Princess Charlotte, the only child of King George the Fourth, was buried in a nighttime state funeral in 1817, "the undertakers were so drunk they dropped the coffin," Rowbotham said. 

"William the Fourth's funeral by all accounts was absolutely shambolic and Victoria was determined that it wasn't going to be like that for her."