Prince Philip’s thanksgiving: the order of service

Almost a year after his death, members of the Royal Family will gather in Westminster Abbey today to pay tribute to the life and achievements of Prince Philip.

The funeral of Prince Philip  last April was “scaled back significantly” owing to Covid restrictions, with just 30 mourners able to attend the small ceremony at Windsor Castle, said Sky News’ royal correspondent Rhiannon Mills.

But today, the Abbey’s door “will be flung open” to guests for the Service of Thanksgiving that the Duke “never asked for and was unlikely ever to have expected”, said The Telegraph’s associate editor Camilla Tominey.

A chance to remember

The 40-minute ceremony offers the Queen the opportunity “to attend a service in her beloved husband’s memory without having to sit alone in the pews, her face covered by a black mask”, as she did last year, said The Telegraph’s Tominey. This service will be “more of a celebration than a commiseration of his death”, enabling Her Majesty to “honour the life her late husband lived to the full”.

According to Buckingham Palace, The Queen has been “actively involved” in planning the memorial.

The service will pay tribute to Philip’s “contribution to public life and steadfast support for the over 700 charitable organisations with which His Royal Highness was associated throughout his life”, according to the official Royal website. Representatives from those charities will be in attendance, and the ceremony in its entirety will “reflect Prince Philip’s life, work and enthusiasms”, said the BBC’s royal correspondent Sean Coughlan.

The Thanksgiving service will “be the state occasion that the reluctant royal shunned – but that his loved ones always insisted he dearly deserved”, added Tominey.

What will happen?

“Some of the original elements” from Philip’s funeral plans will be included in today’s service, such as the attendance of “gold award holders from The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and representatives from UK Cadet Force Associations”, said Sky News’ Mills. Members of the clergy from the royal estates of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral will also play a part in the service, in accordance with Philip’s wishes for his funeral. 

The Royal Marines Portsmouth band will play as the congregation arrives at Westminster Abbey, where Philip and the Queen married in 1947. The Service itself will feature music sung by the Abbey’s choir and that of Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace. They will perform Te Deum in C by Benjamin Britten, and the congregation will sing Guid Me, O Thou Great Redeemer. 

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/956247/prince-philips-thanksgiving-the-order-of-service