No wonder the Queen was given such a stunning send off

Ten days of heartbreak for the late Queen and hope for the new King came to a conclusion yesterday.

The outpouring of grief for the Queen has been real, and not a display of synthetic emotion.

Queen Elizabeth’s passing represents in so many respects the end of an era.

No-one under the age of 80 today remembers World War II, and no-one under the age of 95 actually served in it. The Queen, who died this month aged 96, did in fact serve. When she turned 18 in the spring of 1944 she joined the women’s branch of the British Army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

It was a foretaste of the lifetime of duty that she did not in fact seek – Princess Elizabeth would not have been immediately in line to the throne had her uncle Edward VIII not abdicated, and she was happy as a naval wife and mother.

But without complaint she sacrificed any private ambitions she had for the God-given role that she was given. And the Queen, who was increasingly explicit in broadcasts such as her Christmas Day speech about her private faith, certainly believed it was God-given.

Around the world people saw this, typically just from TV reports. The saw a person who, reading between the lines of Archbishop Welby’s interesting sermon yesterday, did not cling to power and privilege but instead responded only to a calling, that defined her until her death.

No wonder tens of thousands of people queued 12 hours or more to pay their respects. No wonder more than a million people took to the streets of London. No wonder crowds lined the Royal Mile in Edinburgh or outside the city hall in Belfast. No wonder TV audiences will have been huge yesterday (we can safely predict they were so even ahead of the actual verified figures). No wonder people are buying newspapers in large numbers.

It almost seems trivial to say that yesterday’s services, ceremonies and processions were stunning. The Queen’s record transcends such ephemera.

But it was stunning. And it isn’t a coincidence. This country does ceremony exceptionally well. It is a traditional culture, and admired around the world for it (somewhat envied too). The Queen represented the very best of that long tradition, and how fitting that she was given such a send off.