Ben Lowry: I have not before seen a spontaneous display of affection for royalty on such a scale in Belfast city centre

In my case, I flew to Edinburgh on Monday morning and watched the procession that took Queen Elizabeth II from Holyrood to St Gile’s Cathedral.

That afternoon I joined the five-hour, mile-long queue to see the late monarch lie in state in the cathedral.

On Tuesday I flew back to Belfast where I watched the new King Charles drive through the city.

It is hard to know where to begin in summarising it all.

My strongest memory from Scotland was of the four royal siblings — the king, the Princess Royal, the Duke of York and the earl of Wessex — following the hearse up the gradual incline of the Royal Mile.

The crowd on either side of the narrow street was several people deep. Suddenly the bereaved siblings were right in front of us all, looking ahead, as they trekked slowly behind their mother’s coffin.

The only sound was hooves of two police horses in front. A Royal Regiment of Scotland guard walked in silence around the hearse.

When you have grown up with the four younger royals and known them from TV over several decades, they never seem to be old, yet not one of them could now be called young — even Edward is almost 60.

And there they were, with solemn expressions, toiling up a hill, in a step that seemed like a march.

Never before have I seen more vividly illustrated the truth that great wealth or status or power is a matter of no consequence when it comes to something so elementary to the human experience as mourning the loss of a parent.

At points people in the crowd began to applaud but I was relieved this did not catch on. It was a more powerful moment in silence.

Later the snaking queue was much shorter than is being reported in London but even so it was so long as to be ultimately physically painful (in my case for the soles of my feet) but people got to know the people who stood around them and a camaraderie developed.

I saw a lot of the old, traditional Scotland that was described as the ‘silent majority’ that made little fuss during the 2014 independence referendum but which prevailed with a 10% majority to stay in UK. This is not to say that those around me were all unionists. I have no idea if they were or not. Plenty of people in the queue were not even from these islands. But they were people who deeply admired the Queen and the old values that she represented, of service and lack of complaint.

Then in Belfast I had a media place outside St Anne’s Cathedral but knew that above all I wanted to be present at the drive past city hall.

Belfast’s key civic building is at the heart of a beautifully laid out central core, one of the most attractive urban centres of all the cities in the entire UK. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, all of them are attractive cities with solid architectural buildings that reflect their industrial past, but none has a city centre so suited to gatherings.

I was outside Belfast city hall for the boisterous 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement rally and for the hushed gathering on September 12 2001 in commemoration of the people killed in the unspeakable attacks on the Twin Towers the day before.

But I have only ever seen photographs of central Belfast being laid out in this different way, with crowds stretched all along the long boulevard that runs from Royal Belfast Academical Institution to the Law Courts. This set-up was used for military marches after the Great War, but I do not recall it in my life.

Earlier I had thought the crowds would not be large. While the king’s visit was no secret, the exact timings that he would drive by with the Queen consort, Camilla, were unknown to most people. And so, I remembered the day in 2011 when the engaged William and Kate came to city hall, and initially there was no-one there, until a delighted crowd grew as word of their arrival spread.

But on Tuesday the crowd was huge. I squeezed on to a low wall in front of Marks and Spencer.

We only knew the royal convoy was approaching when the crowds began to cheer further down the road to my right, out of sight, towards Wellington Place (the web version of this article will have a video clip of that moment).

I have two minor quibbles about how the day panned out, both relating to this truly extraordinary moment in the history of Belfast.

One, that there seemed to be no aerial footage of it, as there has been for much of the rest of the king’s convoys by car across the four home nations.

Two, that the royal party did not travel much more slowly, and give the thousands of people who had come out on a sunny day to see them a bit more time to show their appreciation and to witness the rare passing of a new king.

Tuesday saw Northern Ireland’s own ‘silent majority’, who do not make a clamour. I do not just mean unionists or monarchists, because no doubt that Belfast crowd was made up not only of unionists but also of curious nationalists and neithers. But I mean a silent majority that, whatever its convictions, is not actively hostile to royalty or to Britishness. People who might not choose a system of hereditary monarchy (frankly, who in the 21st century would?) but who recognise that in the UK it has actually worked well, particularly because the recent monarchs and the next in line have so obviously devoted themselves to the county.

And there is a more explicit lesson to be learned about Britishness.

This column often looks at the way in which it is subtly suppressed, in which it is made to be contested and only one of a number of ‘narratives’ which each have equal validity, as if the sovereignty as enshrined by the principle of consent has no supremacy or indeed no real consequence.

Yet, on Tuesday, we were one of the four home nations in the UK, and people in Hillsborough and Belfast showed that they were delighted to be so.

And if there had been time for the drive-by to snake its way round NI, the thousands of people, who came out would have been hundreds of thousands.

A final thought.

If anything has given a blow to the simplistic notion that Prince Charles acceding to the throne will be the end of the Union it has been the last week.

The Union might begin to wither in the coming decades or it might flourish.

Both possibilities seem plausible to me, but for now it represents the status quo, and there is, it seems, a deep well of instinctive support for that status quo.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor