Necropolis: London & it's Dead (37 page)

While Dodi Al Fayed was buried within twenty-four hours of his death in the accident, according to Islamic law, the body of Diana lay at the Chapel Royal, in St James’s Palace, until the evening before the funeral. It was then moved to her apartments at Kensington Palace where it remained overnight. The Bishop of London and the Sub Dean of the Chapels Royal kept a candlelit vigil of prayer over the coffin throughout the night.

On Saturday, 7 September, the coffin left Kensington Palace on a gun carriage of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, and was escorted on foot by members of the Welsh Guards and mounted police along a route lined by thousands of mourners. An estimated six million people had been expected to attend, but in the event only three million filled the streets, deterred by the prospect of traffic jams.

The coffin, draped with the Royal Standard, bore a card reading
MUMMY
, from Diana’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry who, along with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh and Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, joined the procession in The Mall and followed her coffin to the Abbey. Meanwhile, the Queen led members of the Royal family in paying their respects outside Buckingham Palace.

The route passed Hyde Park, where many thousands more
watched the procession and service on two giant screens. At Hyde Park Corner the procession passed under Wellington Arch before moving into Constitution Hill. Following the service at Westminster Abbey, Diana’s coffin was taken by road to the family estate at Althorp. She was buried, in sanctified ground, on an island in the centre of a lake. The grave faced east, towards the rising sun. Like her aristocratic ancestors, she was buried, not in London, but on her country estate.

There is no doubt that the spontaneous outpouring of grief was fanned by the very newspaper proprietors who had persecuted Diana during life, but another element was also at play. The intense sorrow which greeted Diana’s death was the striking of a national chord. The Princess’s troubled life story was recognizable from soap operas and our own lives, and her death was curiously familiar: an attractive single mother killed in a car crash on a Saturday night; the bereaved sons, troubled ex-husband and difficult in-laws: the
Dramatis Personae
resonated. Interviewed at vigils, many people explained that the death of Diana and the intense mood that was prevalent allowed them to revisit personal bereavements, in a culture where formal mourning was no longer a regular feature of everyday life. The grief for Diana also seemed to have a particularly feminine quality. Such an emotional response to the death of a (former) female Royal was unprecedented. The subjects of Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria had become critical of their monarchs by the time they died. It is perhaps the feminine aspect of Diana’s death and funeral which caused some male commentators to throw up their hands in despair at such overwhelmingly emotional displays.

Diana’s was an individual tragedy, inspiring an extraordinary and unique response. The reaction to the London bombings of 2005 presented a far more recognizable picture of Londoners under duress. On 7 July 2005, the day after the capital had been successful in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, four suicide bombers struck in central
London, killing fifty-two people. Three bombs went off at 8.50 a.m. on Underground trains just outside Liverpool Street and Edgware Road Stations, and on another one travelling between King’s Cross and Russell Square. The final explosion, about an hour later, was on a bus in Tavistock Square, opposite Euston Station.

The attacks seemed particularly devastating to the London psyche as they took place on public transport. The red bus has always been a symbol of London. To see one bombed felt like a crushing blow to the London spirit. And the very Underground tunnels which had provided shelter from the Blitz became a source of terror.

However, a day after the bombings, Londoners were returning to the Underground with gritted teeth, faced with the prospect of losing their livelihood if they did not show up for work. While the most affluent took to taxis, and corporate buses were laid on in the City, thousands sought other methods of transport–and the sale of bicycles soared.

Amidst the many tales of individual heroism from members of the emergency services and the general public, the bloody-minded stoicism that had seen Londoners through the Black Death, the Plague and the Blitz came into play. One old lady from the East End shook her fist at the heavens and declared that she had survived the Luftwaffe and
she
would decide when it was time for her to go!

The informal memorial garden that sprang up at King’s Cross contained a wreath of carnations spelling out the logo of the London Underground–a symbol at once familiar and, in this context, tragic. The funerals of the fifty-two known victims–Humanist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other faiths–reflected the fact that London is now multicultural, and that there are many different ways of saying goodbye.

Which is what, ultimately, we must all do. London has seen numberless deaths over the past 2,000 years, and that tumulus on Hampstead Heath has gazed down impassively on many funerals.
But, in the end, we all have to depart. Let me leave you with this beautiful extract from
The Soul of London
, by Ford Madox Ford:

For all of us it must be again London from a distance, whether it be a distance of six feet underground, or whether we go to rest somewhere on the other side of the hills that ring in this great river basin. For us, at least, London, its problems, its past, its future, will be at rest. At nights the great blaze will shine up at the clouds; on the sky there will still be that brooding and enigmatic glow, as if London with a great ambition strove to grasp at Heaven with arms that are shafts of light. That is London writing its name upon the clouds.

And in the hearts of its children it will still be something like a cloud–a cloud of little experiences, of little personal impressions, of small, futile things that, seen in moments of stress and anguish, have significance so tremendous and meanings so poignant. A cloud–as it were of the dust of men’s lives.

Notes

1:
A PAGAN PLACE: CELTIC GOLGOTHA AND THE ROMAN CEMETERIES

1
See Taylor,
Burial Practice in Early England
, p. 27.

2
See Baxter, ‘Dancing with the dead in a mass grave’,
British Archaeology
, 50, December 1999.

3
ibid
.

4
Translated by Charles W. Kennedy, see Kermode and Hollander, eds,
The Oxford Anthology of English Literature
, vol. 1, pp. 97–8.

5
See De la Bédoyère, Guy http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/I-m/london1.html (December 2005).

6
See Ariès,
Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present,
p. 14.

7
See Taylor,
loc. cit.
, p. 89.

8
See Browne,
Hydrotaphia Urne-Buriall, or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk
, p. 267.

9
ibid.
, p. 289.

10
http://www.eng-h.gov.uk/ArchRev/rev94_5/eastcem.htm

11
See Thomas, ‘Laid to rest on a pillow of bay leaves’,
British Archaeology
, 50, December 1999.

12
See Kermode and Hollander,
loc. cit
., vol. 1, pp. 29–30.

2:
DANSE MACABRE
: LONDON AND THE BLACK DEATH

1
‘Bones Reveal Chubby Monks Aplenty’,
Guardian
, 15 July 2004.

2
See Holmes,
The London Burial Grounds,
pp. 36–7.

3
ibid
., pp. 36–7.

4
ibid
., p. 33.

5
ibid
., p. 34.

6
See Harding,
The Dead and the Living in Paris and London 1500–1670
, p. 46.

7
See Ariès,
Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present
, p. 15.

8
‘The Black Death 1348’, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2001).

9
ibid
.

10
See Maitland,
History of London
, p. 128.

11
See Hawkins, ‘The Black Death and the New London Cemeteries of 1348’,
Antiquity
, vol. 64, no, 244, pp. 637–42.

12
See Maitland,
loc. cit.
, p. 128.

13
ibid
.

14
See Hawkins,
loc. cit
., pp. 637–42.

15
See Cantor,
In the Wake of the Plague
, p. 207.

16
See White,
loc. cit.
, p. xi.

17
ibid
., pp. xiii–xiv.

18
ibid
., p. xxiii.

19
ibid
., p. xxvii.

20
ibid
., p. xxiv.

21
ibid
., p. xxiv.

22
ibid
., p. 6.

3:
MEMENTO MORI
: THE THEATRE OF DEATH

1
See Shakespeare,
Julius Caesar
, II, ii.

2
See Dekker,
The Wonderful Year
, p. 181.

3
See Holmes,
The London Burial Grounds,
p. 98.

4
See Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, V, i.

5
See Holmes quoting Maitland,
loc. cit.,
p. 33.

6
ibid
., p. 38.

7
Nashe, Thomas, ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’, line 1588.

8
See Holmes,
loc. cit
., pp. 69–70.

9
See Bell,
Unknown London
, pp. 192–3.

10
ibid.,
p. 47.

11
See Puckle,
Funeral Customs
, p. 44.

12
See Dekker,
loc. cit.
, p. 168.

13
See Chettle,
Englandes Mourning Garment.

14
See Woodward,
The Theatre of Death
, pp. 87–117.

15
See Holmes,
loc. cit.
, p. 57.

16
See Dugdale,
History of St Paul’s
, p. 129.

4:
PESTILENCE: DIARY OF A PLAGUE YEAR

1
See O’Donoghue,
The Story of Bethlehem Hospital
, p. 192.

2
See Dunbar, ‘In Honour of the City of London’,
The Oxford Book of English Verse
, pp. 26–7.

3
See Defoe,
A Journal of the Plague Year
, p. 3.

4
See Pepys,
Diary
, 30 April 1665.

5
See Defoe,
loc. cit
., p. 8.

6
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 7 June 1665.

7
See Hodges,
Loimologia.

8
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 3 August 1665.

9
See Defoe,
loc. cit
., p. 38.

10
ibid
., p. 175.

11
See Porter,
The Great Plague
, p. 18.

12
See Holmes,
The London Burial Grounds
, p. 124.

13
ibid
., p. 124.

14
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 15 June 1665.

15
ibid
., 17 June 1665.

16
ibid
., 23 June 1665.

17
ibid
.

18
See Defoe,
loc. cit.
, p. 9.

19
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 12 August 1665.

20
ibid
., 31 August 1665.

21
ibid
., 3 September 1665.

22
ibid
., 18 July 1665.

23
See Defoe,
loc. cit
., p. 58.

24
ibid
., pp. 58–9.

25
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 6 September 1665.

26
See Bell,
The Great Plague in London, 1665
, p. 185.

27
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 30 August 1665.

28
See Defoe,
loc. cit
., p. 59.

29
Thomson, George,
Loimotomia, or The Pest Anatomised
, p. 66.

30
See Hodges,
loc. cit
.

31
See Defoe,
loc. cit
., p. 218.

32
ibid
., p. 219.

33
http://www.zurichmansion.org/parks/.50.html (November 2005).

34
See Bell,
loc. cit.
, p. 284.

35
See Pepys,
loc. cit
., 30 January 1666.

5:
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
: A VISION OF ELYSIAN FIELDS

1
See Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, p. 158.

2
See Puckle,
Funeral Customs
, p. 76.

3
See Holmes,
The London Burial Grounds
, p. 213.

4
ibid
., p. 134.

5
See Maitland.

6
See Pepys,
Diary
, 18 March 1664.

7
ibid
., 23 February 1668.

8
See Litten,
The English Way of Death
, pp. 41–2.

9
See Donne, ‘Devotions’, XVII.

10
See Puckle,
Funeral Customs
, p. 55.

11
Evelyn quoted in
ibid
., p. 62.