William Cash pays respect to the Queen and encounters the Catholic Ghosts of Westminster Hall 

‘File into two lines, gently now’ was the command we were given by a tail-coated official as us pilgrim mourners entered a strangely silent Westminster Hall to pay our final respects, and offer prayers, to Her Majesty the Queen. The flight of flagstone steps – as wide as a cricket wicket – leading down into the Hall from St Stephen’s Entrance was now heavily muffled by brown carpet the colour of a cigar.

Only a few months ago much of the Hall had been under building scaffolding. Now it was dressed up like a royal stage set with theatrical stage lights positioned under the rib-like hammer-beams of the roof to make it look like a vast lit up medieval cathedral.

‘Please step gently‘ again added the Palace of Westminster official in a more hushed tone as we began walking down past the chapel of St Mary’s Undercroft (its black iron gate railings boarded up as if waiting for a set change) towards the Queen’s catafalque. As I stepped onto the thick carpet, one felt as if one had finally reached the altar at the end of some vast five mile communion queue. 

But this was a form of communion with history. As royal pilgrims – some of whom had shuffled through the night along the banks of the River Thames from Southwark – we were stepping into Britain’s history and collective memory. 

But to a Catholic, walking into Westminster Hall is always weighted with history; and there is little gentle about it. The sound of scaffolding going up, the first step up to the block, the sight of the executioner’s axe or noose and the spilling of Catholic blood. 

The hall chamber – built by William Rufus, son of William the Conquerer in 1097 with its majestic wooden hammer-beam roof added by Richard II in 1397- is haunted by its Catholic ghosts: the trial of St Thomas More in July 1535, the January, 1649, trial of King Charles I  (called the ‘martyr king’ as he paid the ultimate price for his belief in the Divine Right of kingship) and that of Guy Fawkes in January 1606. In November 1581, the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion was put on trial in Westminster for high treason and for conspiring to raise a sedition and dethrone Queen Elizabeth I, his former friend.   

As I passed the coffin of the Queen, draped with her royal standard, with her jewel encrusted crown on a purple cushion, I made the sign of the cross and prayed for her.  I may recognise the office of the Holy Father as head of the one true church but few monarchs have lived with a deeper sense of Christian values and done more to improve relations between Catholics and Anglicans. 

Under Queen Elizabeth II, and largely thanks to her, the 16th and 17th century ghosts of British Catholic history have been exorcised. There is no longer any froideur or stand off between the Papacy and the Supreme Governor of the Church of England  (‘Defender of the Faith’). She had official meetings with five popes either in Rome or Britain starting with Pope Pius XII and John XXIII. In 1982, she received John Paul II at Buckingham Palace; in 2010, she welcomed Pope Benedict XVI in Edinburgh and in 2014 she wore a purple dress to be received by Pope Francis at the Vatican. 

From 1998-2000, her very own Lord Chamberlain was Baron Camoys, whose recusant family seat of Stonor Park is where Jesuit martyr St Edmund Campion set up his printing press to distribute copies of his ‘Ten Reasons’ (in defence of the Catholic Faith). Stonor was raided after Campion’s capture and torture and family members taken prisoner. So to bring back Lord Camoys as Lord Chamberlain was loaded with symbolism.  

It may be a cliché to observe that the English do love a queue. But the numbers attending the Lying-in-State of Queen Elizabeth II has no precedent in British history. Whilst over 320,000 people paid their respects to Churchill in 1965 over three days, and around 200,000 filed past the Queen Mother in 2002, an estimated million people – some flying in from around the world – will have paid their respects to Britain’s longest ever serving monarch before her State Funeral. 

The queue of mourners stretched back over five miles to Southwark, home of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer’s 29 pilgrims famously set off for the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury in around 1385 in search of salvation and some roustabout holiday travel fun meeting up with strangers, or even potentially ‘hooking up’ with a new partner in the case of the Wife of Bath. So with Elizabeth II’s pilgrims-in-arms. 

Chaucer, of course, was an MP for Kent as well as a court poet and knew Westminster Hall well as it also formed part of the court and royal residence. 

What I took away was the sacred experience of the officially marshalled almost Trappist silence. With no photography or selfies permitted, the regal silence was in marked contrast to the way that crowd fights had almost broken out along the Mall earlier in the day when the public had queued to witness the Procession of the Queen’s coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall, pulled by a gun carriage as King Charles and members of royal family walked behind her. 

As I stood by Marlborough Gate, with the crowd five or six deep, the moment the Queen’s red and yellow royal personal standard came into view, a sea of iPhone sticks went up. People shoved and the phones jostled for position like a frenzied Punch and Judy show. An American woman in front of us in a purple Lycra track suit was determined to video every moment on her phone waving her octopus arms about at full stretch like a goalkeeper preparing for a penalty. People shouted at her to have more respect. 

She seemed determined not to savour the moment of living history but to ‘capture’ the experience like a ready meal for later consumption. But the whole point of witnessing historical events in person is it offers the chance to step back into a more medieval world, before social media, cameras and TV, when to witness history you had to be there. What T.S Eliot called sacred ‘timeless moments’, in which history and time stand still and we can be redeemed by time present: 

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern 
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails 
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

Thus was how it felt in Westminster’s Great Hall on a late September afternoon. A feudal form of timeless respect which certainly had a spiritual quality.  Alas, the same desecration of place by I Phone stick has ruined the experience of visiting the Sistine Chapel or St Peter’s. Sacred and profane moments require the respect of silence. As with the Catholic faith, the unspoken can be as important as the spoken. My politician father, the oldest MP in the Commons at 82, sat glued for hours over the weekend on his sofa simply watching the silent live feed of the Lying-in-State on the BBC Parliament Channel.  

In the ever increasing absence of religion and spirituality in our digitally obsessed secular world, we increasingly crave or seek authentic, emotional collective experiences; or what Catholics are lucky enough to experience every week at Mass – the sacramental and divine. 

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