Peers have paid warm tributes to the Queen Mother during a special sitting of the House of Lords.

A humble address was moved on Wednesday - led by the Leader of the Lords, Lord Williams of Mostyn - who said it was an occasion for not only sadness and mourning but also a commemoration of her life of service.

The celebrations that had marked the Queen mother's 100th birthday reflected "the warmth and affection in which she was held" said the peer.

He said she brought "smiles wherever she went" and praised her "boundless charm, perceptiveness, enlivened by a sparkling wit".

Lord Williams said that her wartime role was "a beacon of encouragement that will forever stay in the memory".

He said we should remember the Royal family at this time.

"We have lost the Queen Mother, we need to remind ourselves that Her Majesty the Queen has lost the counsel of a Queen and a mother," he said.

"It is in that spirit that we offer our truest sympathy to Her Majesty the Queen and all the members of the Royal family.''

For the Conservatives, Lord Strathclyde said: "It is indeed a sad and sombre moment. It is sad that it should come so soon after the death of Princess Margaret and in the jubilee year."

He paid tribute to a woman who was "a pillar of stability, good humour, a joy to all those whose life she touched".

"In her long life she knew testing times but she never wavered," he said.

He said that "no generation alive in Britain and the Commonwealth" would be unaffected by her death. "Her life spanned a century of enormous change in the world and more particularly here in the UK," he added.

The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Baroness Williams of Crosby, said the Royal family had suffered two serious blows with the deaths of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.

"The Queen Mother brought, of course, a great deal of dedication to public service. But there was another quality that made the Queen Mother special," she said.

"She reached out to everybody that she met. She had a capacity to extend affection and love to all kinds of people."

Baroness Williams believed the Queen Mother's greatest achievement was in modernising the Royal family.

"We owe her a very great deal for the evolution of the monarchy to be much closer to its people," she said.

On behalf of the Lords Spiritual, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Cary, praised "a life well-lived".

"We all recognise a sense of real loss," he said before adding that her life had been a "marvellous example of service and duty".

On a personal note, in what is one of his final public duties before retiring, he said: "I may have been one of eight archbishops but she was unique."

Also in attendance in the chamber was Baroness Thatcher, one of the greatest admirers of the Queen Mother.