BRITAIN PLANS A FUNERAL FIT FOR A QUEEN.

Byline: Fawn Vrazo Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Horses will draw her coffin's open carriage somberly through central London as millions of mourners line the streets. Two thousand special guests, from the queen to commoners, will pray in Westminster Abbey as she is memorialized.

Princess Diana's funeral Saturday will be unlike anything ever seen in Great Britain's long history of royal funerals. It will be ``very much a unique funeral for a unique person,'' a Buckingham Palace spokesman said Monday night.

Plans for the beloved princess's final farewell, which is to be televised worldwide, were the result of what one London newspaper described as ``delicate negotiations'' between the royal family and the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The still-to-be finalized arrangements represented a compromise between the wishes of the many in England who wanted an all-stops-pulled state funeral with marching troops and firing guns and of the others, likely including members of the royal family and Diana's closest relatives, who wanted something smaller and more dignified and private.

``It is right and proper that the people of Britain have their chance to pay their respects to Diana,'' said Diana's brother, Charles the Earl of Spencer.

The White House announced Monday that President Clinton would not attend the funeral.

``Consultations are ongoing to determine the appropriate representation for the president and the people of the United States,'' spokesman Joe Lockhart told reporters accompanying Clinton on his three-week vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Speculation as to who will represent the United States centered on Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

The special funeral service announced Monday resolved a thorny royal problem: How to honor the former wife of one future king - and mother of another - who has been stripped of her royal title and disgraced in regal circles, yet is so adored by ordinary Britons that some were threatening to march behind her hearse unless she was honored with a very large, stately and public display.

It was Blair's office that reportedly convinced Buckingham Palace, with gentle diplomatic pressure, that a funeral service allowing the widest participation by the British public was the best course.

And so Diana's closed coffin will be borne upon a ``gun carriage'' - an open, flat horse-drawn carriage with large wheels - that has been used for decades for royal British funeral processions. Explained a palace spokesman: ``It doesn't close off the spectators from the proceedings.''

The invitation-only funeral of Diana, who died at the age of 36 in a Sunday Paris car crash that also killed her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, and the driver of their car, will begin at 11 a.m. (3 a.m. PDT) in the imposing 11th century Westminster Abbey near Parliament and Big Ben.

All indications are that virtually the entire country will come to a standstill that day as hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of mourners line the streets.

Sporting events scheduled for the day have been canceled, and so has the weekly Saturday night drawing of the National Lottery. A two-minute silence will be observed at airports, train stations and elsewhere.

Thousands of stores including the world-famous Harrods department store, owned by Fayed's father, will remain closed the entire day.

By the thousands, Britons already have brought mountains of floral bouquets to Buckingham Palace and the walls outside Kensington Palace, the princess's residence.

Monday, a line of thousands waited up to five hours to sign four ``books of condolence'' in a room at St. James' Palace, the home of Diana's former husband, Prince Charles. In another room at the palace, the 16th century Chapel Royal, Diana's body lay in a coffin set before an altar where Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840.

Members of the royal family were expected to pay private visits to the chapel before Saturday, but - unlike those honored in state funerals - Diana's body will not lie in state at any point.

In keeping with the wishes of her own family, she will be interred privately following the funeral near Althorp, her family's home 60 miles north of London, in the Spencer family chapel at St. Mary's Church in Great Brington.

As Saturday's procession begins, Britons - and untold millions watching on television all over the world - will see a procession and ceremony with great dignity but no excessive pomp.

``It will be a service that acknowledges the public desire to express its grief without going over the top,'' noted royals expert and London University Professor Ben Pimlott, author of ``The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II.'' After all, he noted wryly Monday, ``this isn't Argentina.''

After leaving St. James' Palace, Diana's coffin will be carried down Marlborough Road, The Mall alongside St. James' Park, Horse Guards Road, Horse Guards Parade and Arch, Whitehall, Parliament Street, Parliament Square and then finally to the Broad Sanctuary, the road just outside Westminster Abbey.

At the abbey, her coffin is to be placed on a catafalque, a specially built tomb, for the service.

Diana's family and the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, will sit in the front row during the hourlong service, and about 2,000 specially invited guests will sit on simple wooden chairs in the nave and the abbey's north and south ``transepts'' - two additions forming the crosslike abbey's arms.

Although service details remain to be completed, Diana is expected to be memorialized in a traditional high Anglican ceremony.

The fact that her funeral service will be conducted at Westminster Abbey says, more than anything else that Diana, in death, has been welcomed back into the royal fold.

All but two of England's kings and queens have been crowned at the abbey since 1066, and many of its kings, artists and statesmen are buried there.

It is where Elizabeth, the late Diana's former mother-in-law, married Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, on Nov. 26, 1947. Diana's own marriage to Charles took place in St. Paul's Cathedral.

But even inside the historic abbey, the uniqueness of Diana's service will be apparent. Although the guest list has not yet been finalized, it is expected to include many of the ordinary and needy Britons that the princess reached out to many times in her short life.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, map

PHOTO (1 -- color) A mother and her son place flowers outside St. James' Palace in London in remembrance of Princess Diana.

(2 -- color) A police officer directs mourners waiting in line Monday to sign ``books of condolence'' for Princess Diana near St. James' Palace in London.

Associated Press

MAP: (color) The funeral of Princess Diana will be held in Westminster Abbey.