Police snipers were seen lining the rooftops in Edinburgh on Monday amid final preparations to put the Queen’s coffin on view there for 24 hours.
Having journeyed from her Balmoral home to the Palace of Holyroodhouse on Sunday, she will now be carried to St Giles’ Cathedral where she will lie at rest until Tuesday afternoon.
King Charles III will join a procession from Holyroodhouse early on Monday afternoon, arriving at St Giles for a 3pm service.
Crowds are expected to pack Edinburgh’s Royal Mile as the procession travels down it, accompanied by gun salutes, before queueing in large numbers to file past Elizabeth II’s coffin from around 5pm.
Squads of heavily armed officers who guarded the palace and cathedral during Sunday’s proclamation of Charles as King in Scotland were redeployed early on Monday morning.
The police and special forces have been tasked with keeping order outside, while the Queen’s resting place will be guarded by Vigils from The Royal Company of Archers.
Roads have been closed aroud crowded areas to form patrollable areas with ‘hostile vehicle mitigation’ measures such as barriers.
It forms the latest challenge tasked to as many as 10,000 officers from the police and security services throughout the UK during the national mourning period.
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Many of them are believed to have cancelled leave as part of Operation London Bridge, the strict protocol setting out the official response to the death of a monarch.
Efforts to guard the Queen’s procession, funeral and lying in state may be the ‘biggest policing and protective operation the UK has ever mounted’, according to a former counterterrorism chief.
Nick Aldworth, who retired as head of the police’s ‘protect and prepare’ strategy in 2019, said on Saturday: ‘t just takes one car, one person to do something abhorrent and not only have you disrupted a constitutional event, people will be injured and killed.’
Owen West, a retired chief superintendent who specialised in public order, told The Independent: ‘It will be focused around engagement and dialogue with those in the crowd, sharing information that might help them, keeping essential routes free.
‘Large crowds, these days, represent a potential threat to hostile acts so there will be an eye on risk assessment and measures to help protect the body of a crowd against that potential.’
The coffin will remain at St Giles until around 5pm on Tuesday, when it will be flown to RAF Northolt, accompanied by Princess Anne, and then driven to Buckingham Palace.
The Scottish devolved government is urging wellwishers to prepare for hours of standing, with royal experts predicting upwards of 700,000 people could try to view the coffin across its viewings north and south of the border.
Ahead of his appearance at Edinburgh’s procession, Charles sat before both houses of Parliament in Westminster as head of state for the first time.
He appeared emotional as packed benches of MPs and peers stood to sing ‘God Save the King’ before his address.
Describing his mother’s remarkable legacy, he said: ‘As Shakespeare says of the earlier Queen Elizabeth, she was “a pattern to all princes living”.
‘Parliament is the living and breathing instrument of our democracy.
‘That your traditions are ancient we see in the construction of this great hall and the reminders of mediaeval predecessors of the office to which I have been called and the tangible connections to my darling late mother we see all around us.’
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