The funeral home with the coffin of Elizabeth II closed to the public, at 11 the solemn funeral .
The last ones ran through the Southwark Park gate, breathless, to be able to seize the chance to enter Westminster Hall before closing and parade in front of the coffin of the sovereign of a lifetime, who died on 8 September at 96 years , 70 of which spent on the throne of the United Kingdom.
King Charles last night thanked with a public message the "countless people who in these 10 days" have "deeply touched" the Royal Family with their " support and comfort ".
The greeting now gives way to solemn funerals, to the homage of about 500 powerful of the Earth from all latitudes (there is also Mattarella, in London since yesterday) to honor a woman who in 1952 wore the crown when she was just 26 years.
A woman who helped leave behind " a better world ," said Joe Biden.
The grandiose state funeral arranged in Westminster Abbey are the first since those granted to Winston Churchill in 1965 and the most impressive in the contemporary history of the globe.
Also present at the funeral were the princes George and Charlotte , aged 9 and 7, second and third in the line of succession to the British throne.
Meanwhile, the controversy over the invitations made or denied has not subsided: from the one confirmed to China, despite the protests of the British Parliament on the "genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang" to the one that disappeared from the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an embarrassing ally . And then the one immediately denied to Putin's Russia, excluded like Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, Syria and Venezuela.
An exclusion that provoked a reaction in Moscow, where foreign spokeswoman Maria Zakharova Downing Street of "exploiting a national tragedy that has touched the hearts of millions of people", acting in a "profoundly immoral" and even "blasphemous" way ".
