The Queen pressed on with royal duties yesterday, four days after the death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.
She hosted an audience for the former lord chamberlain Earl Peel, who stepped down as the most senior officer in the royal household last month.
The Queen is determined to continue carrying out some solo engagements even as she grieves the loss of Prince Philip, The Times understands.
One of the key events in her diary is the state opening of parliament on May 11, when she is due to be accompanied at the Palace of Westminster by the Prince of Wales.
The death of the duke has highlighted how members of the royal family have joined the Queen increasingly often on her official engagements. They include Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The Princess Royal and the Countess of Wessex, who has a close relationship with the Queen, joined her for engagements by video call during lockdown.
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However, several royal sources have confirmed that the Queen, who turns 95 on April 21, is still likely to carry out engagements by herself.
The week before Philip died the Queen, unaccompanied by any members of her family, attended a ceremony marking the centenary of the Royal Australian Air Force at Runnymede near Windsor. Aides noticed that she seemed to be on particularly good form, chatting engagedly to RAAF personnel and even allowing the engagement to run slightly over time — usually a clear sign that she is enjoying herself.
Engagements further afield, including what are known in royal circles as “away days”, are likely to involve the Queen being joined by a member of her family. This is seen as having several benefits. It eases her workload, makes the day more enjoyable and means that if she has to cancel at short notice the engagement can still go ahead.
There has, according to multiple sources, been no particular new call for the rest of the family to give the Queen more support with her engagements. Instead the arrangements reflect what has been happening since Prince Philip’s retirement in 2017. The number of joint engagements may slowly increase as the Queen gets older but it is expected to be a gradual change.
The period of mourning until April 23 means that the royal family has cancelled most official engagements, but it is possible that they may carry out a handful. These include engagements thought to be particularly appropriate and video calls that are difficult or impossible to reschedule.
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The Queen is not being given her daily red boxes of government papers while she is in mourning and is not giving royal assent to legislation. These rules will be relaxed, though, if anything urgent has to be put before her.
The armed forces are stepping up preparations for Philip’s funeral. It will feature servicemen and women from the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Army and RAF, alongside top military brass, this Saturday at Windsor Castle.
General Sir Tom Beckett, colonel of the Queen’s Royal Hussars, said: “The regiment is mourning for its colonel-in-chief, who has been associated with the regiment for almost seven decades.”
Soldiers from the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) are understood to be working to prepare the special Land Rover, which the duke helped to design, that will carry his coffin on Saturday.
Lieutenant General Paul Jaques, who served with REME, said of the duke, his unit’s former colonel-in-chief: “He used to visit us probably once or twice every single year . . . he had an enormous passion for all things engineering. In his own words, ‘If it wasn’t invented by God, it was invented by an engineer’. ”
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Earl Peel had overseen arrangements for the funeral before handing over to his successor, the former MI5 chief Lord Parker of Minsmere, just over a week before Philip died.
