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Focus on Personal as Britons Bid Thatcher Farewell
(about 9 hours later)
LONDON — A horse-drawn gun carriage bore the coffin of Margaret Thatcher to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Wednesday for a ceremonial funeral that divided British opinion, much as the former prime minister known as the Iron Lady stirred deep and conflicting emotions during her lifetime and, in death, set off an equally passionate debate over her legacy.
LONDON — Armed with a relentless political combativeness in life that earned her designation as the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher achieved a dignified last act on Wednesday with a richly staged funeral notable more for the crowds who cheered her coffin as it rolled through London’s streets on a gun carriage than for the relatively small clusters of protesters who shouted abuse as the cortege passed.
With hymns and prayers and biblical readings, dignitaries from around the world and from Britain’s political elite gathered in the cathedral for a service regarded as austere and devout, reflecting her Methodist upbringing, as bells pealed over the city and a gun salute boomed from the Tower of London.
Since dying of a stroke last week at 87, Britain’s longest-serving prime minister in 150 years — and the only woman to hold the office — continued to stir intense passions. At issue were the elaborate ceremony and estimated $15 million cost of a funeral whose detailed planning she oversaw herself, as well as the socially disruptive consequences of her no-turning-back battles in the 1980s to shake Britain from its long postwar slump.
Some 700 military personnel from three services — the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force — lined the streets, including guards in scarlet tunics and distinctive black bearskin hats on the 24 cathedral steps as the gun carriage proceeded along Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill from the church of St. Clement Danes in a closely scripted display of ceremonial precision honed over centuries.
Security concerns, heightened by the bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday, prompted Scotland Yard to warn that the thousands of police officers deployed along the two-mile route of the funeral procession would arrest anybody judged to have caused “harassment, alarm or distress,” even if the actions were nonviolent.
A military band played a funeral march. Bells tolled. Thousands of people several deep lined the streets behind barriers as the gun carriage passed at a measured 70 paces per minute. Some onlookers applauded, drowning out scattered boos; some cheered and recorded the moment on cellphones and cameras. Under gray and drizzly skies that gave way to watery sunshine, well-wishers threw single flowers into the road, while a handful of protesters turned their backs on the procession.
One leftist group, calling itself Good Riddance Maggie Thatcher, said it had sought prior approval for its supporters to turn their backs on the cortege, as they did when the gun carriage was nearing St. Paul’s Cathedral, Christopher Wren’s magnificent domed edifice in the heart of London’s financial district. Earlier, the coffin, not yet transferred from a hearse to the gun carriage, was driven slowly past 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Thatcher’s residence during her 11 years in power.
The coffin was draped in the Union flag, crowned by a wreath of white flowers with a handwritten note: “Beloved mother — always in our hearts.”
Along the route, the protesters’ rhythmic shouts of “Waste of money!” and “Rest in shame!” were overpowered in a countering wave of clapping, cheering and chanting of “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie!” by crowds standing at least 10 deep in the most congested parts of the route on the approaches to the cathedral. At the funeral’s conclusion, crowds pressed in behind police barriers before St. Paul’s and raised a cheer of “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” as the coffin was loaded into a hearse for its final journey to a family-only cremation in the upscale London district of Chelsea.
Mrs. Thatcher was the country’s first female prime minister. Her radical, market-driven policies and determination to crush labor union power made her one of its most divisive leaders. She died of a stroke last week at age 87.
There were no disturbances, and barely any scuffles, to disrupt an event that had the rare distinction, for a deceased prime minister, of the attendance of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, among the 2,300 invited guests at the funeral. The queen, 87, and the duke, 91, had not attended the funerals of any of the 11 prime ministers who had served in her 61 years on the throne, save for that of Winston Churchill in 1965.
There were moments in the funeral service that recalled her reputation for unwavering faith in her convictions. A biblical passage read by her 19-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Thatcher, proclaimed: “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness.”
One of the few jarring notes at the ceremony came from supporters of Mrs. Thatcher, who noted that by joining with President Ronald Reagan to face down the Soviet Union, she had helped speed an end to the cold war and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. They called President Obama’s decision not to send any senior members of his administration to attend the funeral a slight. The American delegation was led by former Vice President Dick Cheney and two other veterans of Republican administrations, George P. Shultz, 92, and James A. Baker III, 82.
The nature of Wednesday’s 55-minute ceremony — a state funeral in all but name — provoked complaints about its cost and appropriateness. The last British politician to be accorded such a parting accolade was Winston Churchill in 1965, whose funeral also took place at St. Paul’s. But the authorities sought to avoid a politicized event.
Funeral organizers said that they had invited all the former American presidents, but that none had accepted. Officials said they had cited a range of reasons, from poor health in the case of the first President George Bush, to previous engagements, in the case of former President George W. Bush. Initially, organizers said there was a possibility that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would attend, but she, too, declined, as did Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“After the storm of a life led in the heat of political controversy, there is a great calm,” the bishop of London, the Right Rev. Richard Chartres, said in an address. “The storm of conflicting opinions centers on the Mrs. Thatcher who became a symbolic figure — even an ism.”
The absences drew critical comment from across the spectrum of British politics. Gerald Howarth, chairman of a Thatcherite group of Conservatives in Parliament, told The Daily Mail: “The bond forged between the U.K. and the U.S. through Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was instrumental in ending the cold war and liberating millions of people. That the present administration feels unable to be represented as the world marks the extraordinary contribution Margaret Thatcher made will be a disappointment to those who served with her in that endeavor.”
“Today the remains of the real Margaret Hilda Thatcher are here at her funeral service,” he said. “Lying here, she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings.”
Many in Britain viewed the uncontested star among the Americans present as Amanda Thatcher, a 19-year-old granddaughter of Mrs. Thatcher, whose son, Mark, 59, was previously married to Diane Burgdorf, a Dallas-born American who is Amanda’s mother.
And, he continued, “there is an important place for debating policies and legacy; for assessing the impact of political decisions on the everyday lives of individuals and communities. Parliament held a frank debate last week — but here and today is neither the time nor the place.”
Amanda, a college student in Richmond, Va., and her brother, Michael, 24, a chemistry graduate who works as a pharmacist in Dallas, were said by family members to have spoken frequently with Mrs. Thatcher on the telephone in recent years. Both are said by family friends to have been her greatest delight in her declining years, which were marked by an advancing dementia that friends said had caused her to forget the identities of Mr. Reagan and the present British prime minister, David Cameron.
As the coffin moved through the cathedral nave, a choir sang and organ music played. One of the refrains said: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.”
The two grandchildren were given prominent roles at the funeral, walking before the coffin and its military pallbearers down the nave of St. Paul’s, bearing purple cushions with two medals, the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit, which are among Britain’s highest civilian honors, awarded personally by the monarch. Amanda, impeccably dressed in a black coat, a pearl necklace and a broad-brimmed black hat, read the first lesson, from VI Ephesians 10:18, in a soft, composed voice; the second, and last, lesson was read by Mr. Cameron.
The Order of Service handed to congregants began with a quotation from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and ended with a passage from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” which includes the line “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”
Throughout the service, the emphasis was on honoring Mrs. Thatcher personally, not her political accomplishments, something she was said to have demanded in planning sessions, telling officials that she knew she would remain a contentious figure in death. The bishop of London, Richard Chartres, presiding at the funeral, said that while Mrs. Thatcher had become “a symbolic figure — even an ‘ism’ ” in her 11 years in power, the funeral was “neither the time nor the place” for a political reckoning.
After the televized service in the cathedral, a hearse transported Mrs. Thatcher’s coffin first to The Royal Hospital near the River Thames in Chelsea and then to a private cremation in Mortlake, south-west London.
“This is a place for ordinary human compassion of the kind that is reconciling,” he said.
There was no immediate sign of large-scale protests by anti-Thatcher demonstrators but the police kept watch on anyone who might seem suspicious. “I think they stopped me because I had a rolled-up newspaper under my arm, which I think they thought might be a weapon,” said Ben Black, 31, who said he had traveled from Brighton to pay his respects and added that he did not blame the police for taking precautions.
Still, the procession, with its military panoply, and the St. Paul’s service, with the themes of moral rectitude and unflagging fortitude that infused the readings and hymns, conveyed much of what Mrs. Thatcher’s admirers saw as the foundation of her greatness. The hymns spoke for the Victorian values — and the disciplined Methodist upbringing — of Mrs. Thatcher’s childhood.
At Ludgate Circus, close to St. Paul’s, a small group of protesters gathered, some with banners reading, “Now bury Thatcherism.” Some jeered and shouted, “good riddance.” Others chanted, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie — dead, dead, dead.”
As the funeral ended, 30 veterans of her cabinet, fellow Conservatives who are old men now, some of whom were involved in the political coup that forced her resignation in 1990, mingled after the service in the aisles of St. Paul’s. Viewed from an upper gallery reserved for a small band of reporters invited to attend, the most pensive of them appeared to be Michael Heseltine, 80, a multimillionaire publisher and a leader of the 1990 rebels, who Mrs. Thatcher accused of an “unforgivable betrayal.”
Natasha Munoz, a writer from London, said: “I am protesting against the legacy of a woman who as far as I am concerned destroyed this country. She destroyed our communities and our industrial base, she created a culture of the individual and of greed that disgusts me.” She called the funeral “propaganda for her party.”
Mrs. Thatcher’s coffin lay overnight in the historic chapel of St. Mary Undercroft in Parliament, where the English Civil War leader Oliver Cromwell was said to have stabled his horses in the 17th century.
Some 4,000 police officers were on duty, along with an honor guard of 700 military personnel. The organizers code-named their preparations True Blue, the traditional color associated with Mrs. Thatcher’s Conservative party.
Even as the funeral was being planned last week, officials were concerned about the possibility of disruption by political foes of Mrs. Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister for 150 years. But after Monday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, the police indicated that security would be tighter, particularly in light of the array of dignitaries from around the world among the 2,300 guests in St. Paul’s.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attended, along with hundreds of foreign dignitaries, including former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. It was the first time that the British monarch had attended a funeral service for a former prime minister since Winston Churchill’s 48 years ago.
The official American delegation named by the White House was led by two more former secretaries of state, George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III. But some British Conservatives complained that President Obama did not send a senior serving member of his administration.
The guests also included F. W. de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Figures from the opposition Labour Party included former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Ed Miliband, the current party leader.
St. Paul’s is one of London’s great cathedrals associated often with state and royal events, like the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana there in 1981.
As a mark of respect, lawmakers ordered the chimes of Big Ben to be silenced during the funeral, while artillery rounds boomed from the Tower of London. Flags flew at half-staff at government buildings across the city.
Mrs. Thatcher had personally chosen the hymns for the service. One of them — “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” with stirring, Victorian lyrics — is regarded as an anthem of the fierce patriotism ascribed to Mrs. Thatcher throughout her tenure from 1979 to 1990 and particularly when she ordered warships 8,000 miles across the Atlantic to dislodge Argentine troops from the Falkland Islands in 1982.
That war, which cost hundreds of lives, rankles still with Argentina, which claims the islands and whose ambassador declined an invitation to attend Wednesday’s ceremony.
While some Britons protested the fanfare surrounding the funeral of Mrs. Thatcher — whose death certificate listed her occupation as “retired stateswoman” — Prime Minister David Cameron said in a BBC interview before the service that it would be “quite a somber event but it is a fitting tribute to a great prime minister, respected around the world.”
“I think other countries in the world would think Britain had got it completely wrong if we didn’t mark this in a proper way,” he said. Asked whether he accepted that Mrs. Thatcher had been a divisive figure, Mr. Cameron said she created a new consensus. “In a way, we are all Thatcherites now,” he said.
Critics have claimed that the authorities have sought to cloak the cost of the ceremony by not accounting for the deployment of the police and the military. One protester, standing in a persistent drizzle along with around 1,000 spectators outside St. Paul’s on Wednesday, held up a placard complaining that the funeral would cost the equivalent of $15 million at a time when many Britons are facing hard times under the government’s austerity program.
“Thatcher started a lot of the rot in our society,” said Andrew Holder, an electrical engineer, who wore a T-shirt with the slogan “Maggie’s Dead.com” to protest against the funeral.
“This is a fitting place to demonstrate because this is where she started the age of Porsches and champagne,” he said, referring to the cathedral’s location close to Britain’s traditional financial district. “She brought us to where we are today. She bred that age of personal greed.”
