While grand funerals for royalty had all but disappeared from the public scene during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they made a slow, gradual return to the public during the twentieth century. In the first seven decades, Windsor continued as the traditional funeral and burial place for royalty. At the same time, for grand state funerals of non-royalty, St Paul's Cathedral consolidated its position as the supreme venue.

Politically, this period saw not only two world wars, but also the decline and disappearance of the Empire. The royal and state funerals of the people who represented the pre-war Empire thus gained an additional layer of meaning. As David Cannadine summarised, the funerals of monarchs ‘could be interpreted as a requiem, not only for the monarch himself, but for the country as a great power’.

Queen Victoria, 1901

On 22 January 1901, Queen Victoria died after sixty-five years on the throne. During her long reign Britain had expanded into the greatest empire on earth and the public appearance and political position of the monarchy had changed markedly compared to the reigns of the queen's predecessors – not the least with Victoria's elevation to Empress of India in 1876. Bland concludes that Queen Victoria's funeral ‘had to be […] an immeasurably more international event’ than the nineteenth-century royal funerals. Similarly, Wolffe observes that this funeral not only ‘constituted a decisive departure from the limited Windsor obsequies of early nineteenth-century monarchs’, but that it was in general ceremonially outstanding compared to those of the previous centuries: it was ‘an occasion of hitherto unprecedented international significance’. Indeed, this was the first such funeral at which other, foreign royalty was so prominently present in person. At the same time, Queen Victoria's status as Empress of India did not influence the funeral in any particular way. At hers, as well as at the funerals of her successors, the imperial dimension was not reflected in the funeral rites: notwithstanding the monarch's titular promotion, the funeral ceremony as such, like the coronation, remained an essentially British, indeed English, occasion.

Queen Victoria herself had left detailed instructions for a military funeral, ‘simple and with as little pomp as possible’.