Biden talks to King Charles, offers Condolences
Newslooks- (AP)
The White House said Wednesday that Biden ” recalled fondly the Queen’s kindness and hospitality.” Biden and the First Lady, Jill Biden, stayed with the queen at Windsor Castle in June. The White House said Biden ”also conveyed the great admiration of the American people for the queen, whose dignity and constancy deepened the enduring friendship and special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.” Biden is to join other world leaders next week at the queen’s state funeral in London.
Queen Elizabeth II left Buckingham Palace for the last time Wednesday, her coffin borne to the Houses of Parliament by a horse-drawn gun carriage and trailed by grieving family members.
The coffin will lie in state for four days until the late monarch’s funeral on Monday, with hundreds of thousands of people expected to file past. Eight pall bearers carried the oak and lead-lined coffin into Westminster Hall, placing it on a raised platform known as a catafalque.
With the Royal Standard and crown of state resting on top of the coffin and artillery firing salutes at one-minute intervals, the solemn procession from Buckingham Palace was designed to underscore the queen’s seven decades as head of state as the national mourning process shifted to the grand boulevards and historic landmarks of the U.K. capital.
King Charles III, his sons Princes William and Harry and other members of the royal family walked behind the gun carriage.
Thousands of people who had waited for hours along The Mall outside the palace and other locations to line the route held up phones and cameras, and some wiped away tears, as the procession passed. Applause broke out as it went through Horse Guards Parade.
The coffin was draped in the Royal Standard and topped with the Imperial State Crown – adorned with almost 3,000 diamonds — and a bouquet of flowers and plants including pine from the Balmoral Estate, where Elizabeth died last week.
An escort of two officers and 32 troops from the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards in red uniforms and bearskin hats walked on on either side of the gun carriage. Big Ben tolled, a gun salute boomed from Hyde Park and the martial strains of a military band accompanied the procession.
The 38-minute procession ended at Westminster Hall, where Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby led a service attended by Charles and other royals after the coffin was brought in. The choir of Westminster Abbey and the Choir of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal sang the words of a psalm.
“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you,” Welby said as he read from the Book of John.
Thousands of people were standing or sitting in line along the banks of the River Thames waiting their turn to file past the coffin and pay their respects.
The crowds are the latest manifestation of a nationwide outpouring of grief and respect for the only monarch most Britons have ever known, who died at her beloved Balmoral summer retreat on Thursday at age 96, ending a 70-year reign.
