All Souls' Day

Today is the day when we remember and honour those members of our families who have died. It seems a good time to think of the great heraldic funerals of the past - not least the greatest of them all, the 1st (and only) Duke of Rothes who died in Edinburgh in 1681 and whose funeral bankrupted the family for generations.

The cortege was reputedly 17 miles long. The brouhaha about Princess Eugenie's carriage procession at her wedding in Windsor and indeed, less recently, when the Prince of Wales chose to get married in St Paul's Cathedral and reputedly told the security advisers simply to stand the policemen on the route further apart, reminds us that grand processions are ruinously expensive.

and finally