There won’t be any royal cousins getting into fist fights for Kate’s bouquet, and not just because its likely to be so heavy it might knock someone out if it hit them in the head. British royal protocol has other plans for those flowers.
As Kate makes her return trip down the aisle at Westminster Abbey as a newly minted royal, she’ll take a moment to lay her flower at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a grave marker embedded into the church floor in 1920 to commemorate anonymous soldiers killed at war.
“It is one of the ways I remember the boys who didn’t come home,” Michael Selby, a private during World War II who honors the tomb whenever he visits the Abbey, told Yahoo!. “It is a symbol for the men whose bodies lay in a foreign field, a lot of them never identified.”
The tomb, which holds the body of an unidentified soldier brought home from the World War One, is a revered site in England. The tradition of British royal brides laying their flowers on it was started in 1923 by Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who would later be known as the queen mother.
The beloved Bowes-Lyon, who was so well portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter in The King’s Speech (totally worth seeing if you haven’t yet) started the practice during her wedding to “Bertie,” who would become King George VI. She was honoring her brother, Fergus, who died during World War One. The only change to the tradition from subsequent brides has been the timing. Bowes-Lyon laid her wreath at the tomb on the way to the alter, her successors have done so on their way out of church.
