Queen Elizabeth maintained her stoic composure throughout her husband’s funeral service on Saturday, alone and pungently small under the resounding stones of St. George’s Chapel.
Lonely on the bench due to strict social distancing, she lowered her head to mourn her beloved 73-year-old consort, as widows of any rank and fortune could do.
But a casual photograph of the monarch pricking his eyes before on the day he may have captured his only sample of outer pain.
Elizabeth, 94, who has rarely been seen crying in public, touched her hands with black gloves on her eyes and adjusted her mask as she sat on the back of her black Bentley and continued the funeral procession.
“The queen wipes away a tear as she says goodbye to her 73-year-old husband,” the Royal Central photo stressed.
“Did Queen Elizabeth weep at Prince Philip’s funeral?” USA Today wondered in a headline.
“Unable to curb his pain,” insisted the UK’s most unbridled expression of his majesty.
It will never be known if it was a tear or not. The queen was clearly shady, but she had control of herself when she had arrived at the church and during all the gloomy service that followed.
Perhaps the best known intensity of his brief journey from Windsor Castle to St George’s Chapel was Bentley’s position in the procession.
Throughout his marriage, Philip had followed the queen during any public procession, according to royal protocol.
But the queen, who looked small and frail as she grieved, especially as she sat alone in the church, followed the funeral procession in her car on Saturday.
She was behind her husband’s hearse and marchers, instead of advancing in front of them where a monarch would normally be, as if letting him drive her, for a change and for his last procession together.