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The same hypnotic, trance-inducing march played along Whitehall was picked up again by new musicians, flawlessly choreographed, but there was an instantly different aesthetic from the London procession.

The first battalion Grenadier Guards’ scarlet uniforms and black bearskin hats stood out starkly against the bright green fields on the approach to the castle.

A peculiarly unfunereal atmosphere had been mounting in the 24 hours before the service: the pubs were unusually crowded, and souvenir shops were doing brisk business selling postcards with black and white images of the late Queen and rapidly manufactured mugs decorated with slightly off-centre pictures of her face and the dates 1926-2022.

Estate agents had removed pictures of houses for sale from their window displays and replaced them with pictures from the Queen’s life. Even the Thai Massage parlour on Windsor’s high street (Thy Spa)had decorated its shopfront with union jack bunting. 

 

Estate agents’ window display in Windsor. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Rex/Shutterstock© Provided by The Guardian

In the castle at 8am, workers were blowing away any stray leaves and making final adjustments to the flowers. Outside the castle grounds there seemed to have been a lighter-touch approach to removing the town’s homeless population from the streets than there was before recent royal weddings.

A man with his dog and belongings was left undisturbed to sleep on the pavement outside the Duchess of Cambridge pub, as people filed past wearing bowler hats adorned with union jacks.

The Windsor service was a smaller occasion than the state funeral at Westminster Abbey, made up of local friends and staff from the Queen’s various estates, as well as a few former prime ministers and representatives of foreign royal families who had traveled from London to be at the second of the day’s three ceremonies.

As they made their way into the chapel, mourners will have caught a burst of the heady smell of thousands of wilting bunches of flowers, carefully arranged in rows, cellophane removed, to create the impression of a fading flower bed.

The bigger, more extravagant bouquets of lilies, roses and orchids from European royal families, decorated with regal sashes, were lined up by the entrance, alongside a white wreath from the archbishop of Canterbury with a handwritten card: “In thankful memory, may Her Majesty rest in peace and rise in glory.”

The dean of Windsor, the Right Rev David Conner, paid tribute to the Queen in his bidding, remembering her public and private personas, noting the monarch’s “kindness, concern and reassuring care for her family and friend and neighbours”.

“In the midst of our rapidly changing and frequently troubled world, her calm and dignified presence has given us confidence to face the future, as she did, with courage and with hope,” he said.

The service felt peaceful after the howling of the bagpipes and the blasts of canons outside. The coffin descended slowly into the royal vault, as the archbishop read Psalm 103, ending with the words: “Go forth upon thy journey from this world.”

Later a smaller group of the Queen’s closest relatives were due to gather at 7.30pm in the George VI Memorial Chapel, a small, bare stone room, for the final stage of the burial.

The Queen was due to be buried next to her husband, Prince Philip, and near the remains of her father, George VI, the Queen Mother and her sister, Princess Margaret.