Inside The Personal Touches The Queen Added To Her Funeral

As the day of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral draws closer, more details are starting to sharpen into focus — details that the queen had a heavy hand in planning herself. According to the BBC, Queen Elizabeth approved the plans for her funeral long before she died last week (September 8).

Not only did the queen play a role in designing her hearse, but she also requested a piper be included in the ceremony. The piper, the BBC reports, will be playing a lament both at the end of the funeral and while the Archbishop of Canterbury reads a blessing over Queen Elizabeth's casket as it descends into the royal vault. Before this happens, however, the Mirror reports King Charles III will put The Queen's Company Camp Colour of the Grenadier Guards on his mother's coffin. These are "the most senior of the Foot Guard regiments," the Mirror explains, of which the queen was the Colonel in Chief.

The Queen's personal choices are also supposed to have a major influence on not just the songs and the readings, but the order of the service as well, per the BBC.

Overseen by Earl Mashal, the Duke of Norfolk, the Queen's funeral on September 19 will also feature familiar scenes: Prince William, Prince of Wales, walking next to his brother, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex; a flag-draped casket being pulled in a gun carriage by 142 Royal Navy sailors — the same gun carriage that carried Queen Victoria during her funeral (via iNews).