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After a special prayer read by the dean of St. Paul's, organ and choir burst into Churchill's favorite American anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was sung at his express command and in homage to the honorary U.S. citizenship granted him in 1963. It was also symbolic of his lifetime dream of a closer union between the two nations whose blood flowed in his veins. The martial thunder of the old abolitionist hymn, with its stern New England pieties, may at first have sounded startling in Christopher Wren's graceful English Renaissance church, but it was one with the Churchillian spirit—militant, sonorous, confident of being in the right. The church that symbolized the survival of the British nation and the hymn that symbolized the endurance of the American Union—the suddenly mingled echoes of Agincourt and Antietam—served to remind the world of a kinship that goes deeper than shifting alliances and new patterns of power. It was an Anglo-Saxon moment that could not have been lost on Charles de Gaulle, among others, and its impact was lessened only by the absence of the President of the United States.
Empty Seat. The funeral had really begun days earlier in the House of Commons. Preeminently, Churchill was a child of the House, in which he spent full 53 years of his long life. In fact, he was the last man to have served in Parliament under Queen Victoria.
In speaking of Churchill to the House, after a slight nod to the empty seat of the Member for Woodford, Prime Minister Harold Wilson suddenly seemed touched with the Churchillian magic. "Where the fighting was hottest, he was in it," Wilson recalled, "sparing none, nor asking for quarter. The creature and possession of no one party, he has probably been the target of more concentrated parliamentary invective from, in turn, each of the major parties than any other member of any parliamentary age, and against each in turn he turned the full force of his own parliamentary oratory." Churchill, said Wilson, "was a warrior, and party debate was war. It mattered, and he brought to that war the conquering weapon of words fashioned for their purpose: to wound, never to kill; to influence, never to destroy."
As Churchill lay in state in Westminster Hall, the three party leaders, Labor's Wilson, the Conservatives' Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and the Liberals' Jo Grimond, stood together in reverent silence before the catafalque. They must have recognized the Tightness of the scene, for in this very hall and on the very spot where Churchill lay Simon de Montfort had called together Britain's first Parliament 700 years before almost to the day. In its long history the hall had seen prodigies, from the Court of William Rufus in 1099 to the trials of Guy Fawkes and his companions in the Gunpowder Plot, and to the condemnation of luckless Charles I.