“Sir John called himself an atheist for Christ,” the vicar said. “He always came to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But he emphatically did not believe in life after death. My hope,” she added, “is that he has had a wonderful surprise.”

John Mortimer's atheism was one of his most cherished convictions. He loved to cross-examine an archbishop about God and find his evidence deficient.

Yet it was at the little medieval church of St Mary the Virgin, in Turville, near Henley-on-Thames, where his parents are buried, that Sir John's family and friends gathered yesterday to sing The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended at his funeral.

The congregation included neighbours such as Jeremy Paxman and Lord Bragg, old friends such as Bob Geldof, Joss Ackland, Dame Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh, his old colleague Geoffrey Robertson, QC, and his wife, Sir John's best friend Kathy Lette, Lord Kinnock and his wife, Glenys, and a troop of “Mortimerettes”. Richard Ingrams, who always referred to him as Old Rumpole, played the organ.

In the front pews sat Sir John's large extended family. Ross Bentley, the long-lost son of whom he became aware only four years ago, sat with his mother, the actress Wendy Craig. “Dad's aspiration was to write in the way Fred Astaire danced,” Ross said, before reading the words of Let's Face the Music and Dance.

Sir John's son Jeremy, by his first wife, Penelope, read the “Hollow crown” passage from Richard II, including the words “Let's choose executors and talk of wills” - the motto of John's father Clifford, an authority on probate.

We heard Sir John's own voice reading from Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, which best expressed his own pantheistic faith.

Rosie and Emily Mortimer, his daughters by his second wife, Penny, read a favourite poem, Byron's So We'll Go No More a-Roving. Binni Collings, his long-time carer, read a hilarious passage from his memoirs about accidentally burning his shortwave radio in a garden bonfire. Sally, his daughter, and six grandchildren read from Ecclesiastes, and musical interludes came from Alessandro Nivola, his son-in-law, and from his friend Jon Lord, of Deep Purple.

The church, as the vicar reminded us, was home to the village Church of England school that Sir John had fought to keep open when it had dwindled to a handful of pupils by the 1980s. His last legal role was to lead the judicial review of its closure.

When that failed, he led the campaign to turn the school into a centre for underprivileged children from inner cities, who began to arrive in Turville to get a taste of country life and to be entertained at the Mortimers' home. The children would clamour to sit beside John, the vicar said.

Just outside the church stands the White Cottage where Sir John had first lived with “Penny 1”, the first Mrs Mortimer, and her daughters - three of whom, Caroline Mortimer, the actress, Julia Mankowitz, and Deborah Rogers, were at the funeral.

Sir Richard Eyre said that he had never tired of hearing John's anecdotes. “And John,” he added, “never tired of telling them.” He recalled the great raconteur's “melodious, feline, light tenor voice” and his actor's sense of timing. He had not left an adjective attached to his name such as Mortimeresque, but we could all recognise a Rumpole moment, thanks to his invention of that great oxymoron, a loveable lawyer. “It's true he was a champagne socialist. But John loved champagne more than he loved socialism,” Sir Richard said. “He was never more acerbic than when speaking of the politicians he came to despise.

“He loved women, and in return they gave him adulation, tempered by exasperation. He needed an audience and approbation, and when he received these, it was as if the sun had come out.”

The sun, obligingly, came out as the echoes of Jerusalem faded, and Sir John's coffin was borne away for his cremation. Afterwards, when everyone repaired to his father's old house where they had gathered so often before, they could see through the window of his study the desk where he always sat until last week, writing.

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