The first half of the nineteenth century is one of the most intriguing and best documented periods in the timeframe of this study. Royal funerals had been private ceremonies since the seventeenth century – but while throughout the eighteenth century some of them were still at least musical events, in the nineteenth century they became overall inauspicious occasions. After George II's funeral in 1760, the ceremonies became more and more reclusive, and Schaich has referred to the ‘gradual exclusion of the non-courtly public from the proceedings’. Indeed, this became most apparent in the change of location: George II was the last monarch buried in Westminster Abbey. In the early nineteenth century, St George's Chapel, Windsor gradually became the final resting place of the royal family – which it remains to the present day, together with the royal burial ground at Frogmore, in Windsor Great Park. At the same time, however, as in the seventeenth century, there were again public state funerals of military heroes and statesmen.

Royalty up to 1800

The later 1760s saw four royal funerals of higher ranking members of the family. George II's son Prince William, Duke of Cumberland (famous as ‘Butcher Cumberland’ after his victory at the battle of Culloden in 1746) died in 1765. He was followed by three children of Frederick, Prince of Wales: Prince Frederick William in 1766; Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of York and Albany, in 1767 and Princess Louisa Anne in 1768. All these funerals took place in the evening, in Henry VII's Chapel in Westminster Abbey, and were relatively simple and straightforward ceremonies. In fact, one account stressed that the Duke of Cumberland's funeral in 1765 was to be performed in the same manner as that of the Prince of Wales in 1751, but ‘with the Addition of Military Honours’. The relatively short outdoor processions at these funerals were probably accompanied by instrumental music, as reported for the funeral of the Duke of York and Albany in 1767: the ceremonial clearly lists the ‘Drums and Trumpets / Sounding a Solemn March’.

In 1772, the funeral of Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales and mother of George III, seems to have had at least some ceremonial distinction. The report in the Annual Register pointed out that it was ‘performed with the usual ceremony’ and that the procession ‘was exactly in the same order as for the prince her consort’.