The Duchess of Kent’s coffin will be led by a military piper when it begins its journey to Westminster Cathedral on the eve of her funeral service.
In keeping with Catholic tradition, the coffin will travel from Kensington Palace to the Cathedral on Monday for a series of private funeral rites attended by the duchess’s immediate family.
For the first few minutes of the journey a piper from The Royal Dragoon Guards, a regiment the duchess supported as deputy Colonel-in-Chief since its inception in 1992, will walk ahead of the coffin.
Other service personnel from the regiment will form the bearer party who will carry the coffin into the cathedral where it will rest overnight in the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The requiem mass, a Catholic funeral, will be held on Tuesday attended by the King, Queen and other senior royals and will be the first Catholic funeral service held for a member of the royal family in modern British history.
Katharine, the wife of the late Queen’s cousin the Duke of Kent, died peacefully at home, surrounded by her family, on the evening of September 4 aged 92.
A devout follower of the Roman Catholic faith, the duchess became the first member of the royal family to convert to Catholicism for more than 300 years, doing so in 1994, and it was her wish to have her funeral at Westminster Cathedral.
Hers will be the first royal funeral at the cathedral, in Victoria, central London, since its construction in 1903.
On Monday, the funeral rites will include a Vigil for the Deceased, Rite of Reception, which usually involves the coffin being sprinkled with holy water, and evening prayers known as Vespers will be taken by Bishop James Curry, Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster and Titular Bishop of Ramsbury.
The King will not be the first monarch to have attended a Catholic funeral, as Queen Elizabeth II attended the Catholic state funeral of King Baudouin of the Belgians, at St Michael’s Cathedral in Brussels, in August 1993.
Charles, when Prince of Wales, went to Pope John Paul II’s funeral, representing his mother the late Queen, in 2005, while his son William attended Pope Francis’s funeral mass earlier this year.
