Towards the latter part of the seventeenth century, with the funeral of Charles II in 1685, there continued the development that had begun earlier in the century, before the Civil War: that of even important funerals becoming ‘private’ ceremonies. However, following Charles II's ‘private’ funeral, the next royal funeral seemed like a return to earlier customs. The obsequies for Mary II saw once more the full panoply of the traditional grand, heraldic, public royal funeral, if only to vanish after that: this funeral was the last grand public funeral of a senior member of the royal family for over three centuries to come. In this respect, with the ensuing royal funerals following the example of Charles II as private burials, Mary II's funeral was indeed, as Schaich described it, a ‘postcript to an era’.

Charles II, 1685

In 1685, Charles II became the first monarch to be buried in Westminster Abbey since James I. The king had died on 6 February 1685 and was buried on 14 February. There is a considerable amount of material concerning this funeral in the records of the College of Arms. One of them summarised that Charles II's funeral ‘was performed in as solemn a manner as could be’. However, this was a probably a euphemistic summary glossing over the ceremonial short-comings of the event: while Narcissus Luttrell recorded drily that the funeral ‘was solemnized, privately’, John Evelyn observed more sharply that the king was buried ‘obscurely […] without any manner of pomp’. David Jones worded more mockingly that ‘hardly ever was a crowned Head so obscurely interr’d, he having not as much as the Bluecoat Boys to walk before him’. Indeed, a few days after the king's death, John Dugdale reported to his father Sir William Dugdale, then Garter King of Arms who was away from London, that the funeral would be ‘exceeding private’, with ‘not so much as a Footman of ye late King's put in mourning’; moreover, he pointed out that even the participation of the heralds was no foregone conclusion, observing that it was ‘a great question yet whether any officers of Armes will be ordered to attend’.