In September 2022, a curious spectacle played out in the streets of London. Over the course of six days, 250,000 people gathered in an extraordinary queue, at times 10 miles long. The phenomenon was caused by mourners, crowds of ordinary people, deeply moved by the death of a beloved Queen, Elizabeth II.

She was not the first queen to be commemorated on such a scale: 121 years earlier, on February 2, 1901, the grand state funeral of 81-year-old Queen Victoria unfolded at Windsor Castle, a great gathering of European royalty; three centuries before that, in 1603, London played host to the funerary procession of Elizabeth I, who died aged 69. There was ‘such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man’.

However, there was another que

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