Did Queen Elizabeth cry at Prince Philip’s funeral? What the cameras don’t show
- Pandemic concerns meant masks hid royal faces, while television services kept a respectful distance during the ceremony
- The perception that the queen never weeps in public is not true, royal historians say, but there are reasons behind her stoic demeanour
Queen Elizabeth never weeps in public – that’s the common perception forged over seven decades of soaring triumphs and terrible tragedies for Britain’s head of state.
Even if many people believe it, it’s not strictly true, royal historians say.
“There have been more times she’s been in tears than people recognise or choose to remember,” said Sally Bedell Smith, the acclaimed American biographer of the queen and other senior royals.
Bedell Smith ticks off a half-dozen occasions when the queen was in tears, and not just in 1997 when the beloved royal yacht, the Britannia, was retired.
She cried when she went to Aberfan, Wales, in 1966 to meet with survivors of a horrifying avalanche of coal waste that killed 144 people, most of them children, Bedell Smith said.
At her sister Princess Margaret’s funeral in 2002, people who were there and seated near her told Bedell Smith she was “very tearful” and “the saddest I’ve ever seen her”.
“She has shed tears but it’s been at appropriate times, such as the Remembrance Sunday commemorations” for Britain’s war dead every November, adds long-time royal commentator Victoria Arbiter, who spent part of her childhood in Kensington Palace as the daughter of a former press secretary to the queen.