Queen Elizabeth II was married and crowned in Westminster Abbey. In death she entered and left the millennial church with the same words of prayer: “God grant grace to the living; rest to the dead.”

The words are engraved on a stone slab next to the Great West Door through which Elizabeth’s coffin was carried for Monday’s Anglican funeral service, which was attended by leaders of all faiths from around the world.

It was the same words sung by the Abbey’s Dean, David Hoyle – part of the final blessing that concluded the hour-long service before the trumpeters sounded the last post of the cavalry.

There was then a two-minute silence in the abbey and throughout the new kingdom of the late monarch’s eldest son, now Charles III.

The ceremony ended with the national anthem “God Save the King”, symbolizing the passage from one reign to another, and a lone piper playing the Scottish dirge “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep”.

Eight minutes before arriving at the Abbey, the coffin had left Westminster Hall, which had been the scene of hundreds of thousands of public mourners since Wednesday, in a gun carriage pulled by Royal Navy sailors.

At one end of the medieval hall, she passed under a stained glass window commissioned by Parliament for the Queen’s record-breaking platinum jubilee that year, and then past a fountain erected for her silver jubilee in 1977.

The window shows the royal coat of arms with the monarch’s motto “Dieu et mon droit” (God and my rights) – which, like the funeral service, symbolizes the monarch’s God-given role as guardian of the nation.

Atop the heavy, lead-lined oak coffin lay a new wreath of flowers, inscribed “In loving and devoted memory. Charles R” (for Rex or King).

The coffin also carried the instruments of state – the imperial state crown, the orb and the scepter.

They were to be placed on the high altar of St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, where the Queen was to be buried after a final military procession from the Abbey to London’s Wellington Arch.

The funeral was meant to be a private affair for the royal family – in contrast to the grandeur and public nature of the televised abbey service, a last chance for the nation and the world to say goodbye.

Ahead of the service, Westminster Abbey’s tenor bell rang every minute for 96 minutes, marking the age at which Britain’s longest reigning sovereign died on September 8.

Through the Great West Door, eight pallbearers from the Grenadier Guards carried the coffin past the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, an eternal tribute to the British war dead.

They walked down the nave to the high altar, accompanied by a choir singing Bible verses beginning with words from the New Testament book of John: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

In his homily, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby noted words the Queen used on a broadcast as Britain went into lockdown at the start of the Covid pandemic, plunging millions into fearful isolation.

She, in turn, had resorted to a famous song from the Second World War by the popular singer Vera Lynn: “We will meet again.”

“Service in life, hope in death,” Welby intoned. “Anyone who follows the Queen’s example and is inspired by trust and faith in God can say with her, ‘We WILL meet again.'”

The service included readings from the New Testament by Commonwealth Secretary General Patricia Scotland and by Liz Truss – who was appointed by the Queen as her 15th Prime Minister just two days before her death.

As the coffin was carried, the abbey organist played a sonata allegro movement by Edward Elgar – part of a musical program drawing heavily on English composers and chosen by the Queen herself, along with the hymns and prayers.

When applause from the crowd outside swept through the Abbey during the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, it seemed revolutionary and a threat to the monarchy.

But this time applause followed the national anthem after the funeral, symbolizing appreciation for the same values ??Elizabeth had displayed during her long reign since her coronation at the Abbey in 1953 – stoicism and a sense of duty.