Victoria’s vision to use gun carriage

As the late Queen’s coffin was drawn from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall on Thursday, it did so atop the George gun carriage of the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery. It was the same carriage that took her father George VI from Sandringham Church to Wolferton Station in February 1952 on his way to London after his death in Norfolk and was also used for the funeral of her mother in 2002.

For the Queen’s funeral, however, her coffin will sit atop a Royal Navy gun carriage of even greater ceremonial and traditional significance. The Ordnance BL 12-pounder 6cwt [hundredweight] was manufactured in 1896 and never saw active service, but was drafted in for the funeral of Queen Victoria and would go on to carry the coffins of King Edward VII, King George V, King George VI, Sir Winston Churchill and Lord Mountbatten during their processions.

The use of a gun carriage for a monarch’s funeral was an innovation in 1901 when Victoria died.

She had seen such a carriage used for the funeral of her son, Prince Leopold, who had honorary links to Highlander regiments. Watching that military honour, Victoria, who planned her own obsequies, decided she would have it too.

The use of the Navy gun carriage comes with a unique tradition derived by chance from Victoria’s funeral: it is pulled by ratings — non-officers — of the Royal Navy, by hand.

The origin of this custom appears to have been unintentional. One version is that the horses that were due to pull the carriage shied and reared when the coffin was placed on the carriage, threatening to throw it to the ground.

One of Victoria’s grandchildren, Princess Alice, said decades later that the artillery horses had been waiting at Windsor station for hours in the cold and once the coffin was finally placed on the carriage “nothing in the world would make them start”.

Another version holds that an eyelet on the carriage that would have been used to tie the horses to the carriage shattered, perhaps spooking the beasts.

Prince Louis of Battenberg, an Austrian relative of Victoria, father of Lord Louis Mountbatten, asked the Royal Navy representative if his men could pull the carriage.

They could and dozens of sailors “grounded arms” before pulling Victoria through Windsor using improvised drag ropes

“It was better, it looked beautiful,” said Princess Alice, “but, of course, the artillery were furious, you can imagine; humiliated beyond words.”