Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.
Ah yes, duty, that four letter word, turn away in embarrassment when you utter it. In this brave, new,modern world we have no need of old-fashioned ideas like duty, pietas, dharma, these are for the poor benighted heathens who have yet to awaken to this glorious new era. If such a thing does exist at all today it is a duty to oneself and oneself alone, why should we blockade ourselves with a duty to serve others?
Duty and service are very much alive in those of us who have had the privilege to serve in the armed forces and many of us are Christians not heathens either. We continue to try and live by those principles in subsequent civilian employment, which is why we rail at some many of our colleagues and trades people who so often espouse a creed of “good enough to get by”. We have her Majesty to thank for that. Did I see a few Heads of States shifting uncomfrotably in their seats in the Abbey, when they realised during the Archbishop’s address just how far short they fell of her Majesty’s standards of behaviour and how unlikely it was that they would be remebered thus?
Listened to the ghastly Trudeau talking about the late Queen. How marvellous their “little chats” were. How well she listened. Well, yup, a clear contrast to a PM who long ago stopped listening to his citizens.
Because on that is everything good founded. Putting the other before oneself is the core of civilisation. That you (no doubt ironically) feel obliged to state the mantra of others requires a response, hopefully the one that you believe.
Matt M
1 year ago
I bet more than 30% would agree today the Elizabeth was chosen by God. We are not so different from our grandparents. Those people that Orwell famously described as preferring to be caught stealing from the poor box than standing to attention for the national anthem were around in the 1930s as now.
A bit late to your rain shower, sorry. It’s because being a child of a father and mother is a definite fact, whereas the perceived goodness of individual politicians is by no means such an undiluted fact. Hereditary choice stops endless years, nay decades, of wrangling. Why that mother and father and child (well, why any mother, father or child. It doesnt matter)?
One of the good things about life which makes it easier is that certain things are beyond our choice (looks, intelligence, bodily health, likeability). Therefore the only thing to do with them is accept them as unchangeable ‘givens’ of living and continue on.
So disposing of that as the least interesting of questions, we move to consider what protections we have, constitutionally, against the said child of such mothers and fathers, and the answer is: “Quite a few, actually”.
Precisely. A Hajj is an event where people get trampled to death running round a stone and worshipping a murdering paedo. How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.
I know what he meant. The use of the word was so unnecessary, but he and the editors chose to use it. There’s no explanation for using a word that’s at odds with the subject of the story and the people reading it. They are either being very pretentious (some sort of intellectual superiority, or daring, with language), or just plain stupid. In the end they’re just stupid.
I’m not so sure. Haj didn’t give me a moment’s cognitive dissonance. A good anologue of bovine, non-critical, non-thinking mass hysteria and the same baying and spitting outrage if anyone dares to criticise it.
I know what I’m writing is unfashionable, especially amongst those that feel old, angry, past it, ignored and irrelevant – but being rational and reasoning seems to be a bit passé at the moment.
Cling on to your old symbols if you must – but the rest of the world cracks on with modernity while too many of us back in Blighty wallow in misplaced exceptionalism.
Patrick Heren
1 year ago
A charming evocation of an extraordinary time. But words matter and this wasn’t a Hajj. Britain is still a Christian country, as the Queen’s obsequies demonstrated. Christians go on Pilgrimage, even today and in larger numbers than the media understand: to the Holy Land, Rome, Compostela, Walsingham, Lourdes, Guadelupe, and many other devotional destinations.
Use of such words is intended to deliberately inflame, and are best ignored.
I’m convinced that Will Lloyd makes up many of his so-called examples of what actually happens on the ground, to fit his narrative. This article isn’t the first example of this. My view is that his contributions are deliberate click-bait by Unherd. Poor quality, sanctimonious and in former times might just scrape a third at an unranked university, if the marker was drunk.
I think you are right. His “Thud of pom-poms – they go pom-pom-pom not thud. Like the American reporter (NY Times?) on “Jan 06” was going on about the thud of concussion grenades.
Katy Hibbert
1 year ago
This was a good article, but marred by the title and the sentence “A unique British Hajj.”
English has a perfectly good word – “pilgrimage”, which is nothing like a Hajj, and it is completely wrong to associate the Queen’s funeral in any way with a vile and inhuman ideology – I won’t dignify it with the word “religion” – whose so-called prophet was a mass murderer and a violator of little girls.
Islam is a disgusting ideology, which has brought misery to every country it has infested. And it treats women far worse than animals. No Muslim country would allow a woman to be head of state – in many such countries she has no freedom at all.
For a moment there, I thought you were talking about the British Empire. Sorry – my bad. It’s just comedy, masquerading as bigoted nonsense. Great joke – razor sharp irony. Well done.
Brett H
1 year ago
“ … the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”.
Maybe that’s true. When Elizabeth was crowned, one third of the people believed she was chosen by God. Is that figure correct? It seems to me to be on the low side, I imagine it was a lot more.
”The imperfectly educated” needed something simple to understand. But I don’t think the idea of a Queen being chosen by God is necessarily simple, or that believing in it is simple. The idea of the Queen as a visible symbol of unity is very sophisticated. These are the people, her people, and she their Queen. They both understood that relationship, which is why they poured into the streets. So yes, a symbol. But not so simple. It’s a symptom of the age to turn this relationship into something merely symbolic, or meaningless; the modern mind, always doubting what it sees.
I’m one of the “imperfectly educated”, as I have always seen her as a symbol of this nation. I could never see any politician as such, even if I voted for him or her, as perhaps half the population did not.
I agree; someone who has been elected by part of the nation cannot represent the whole nation as can an unelected head of state.
Tony Sandy
1 year ago
Together we stand
Divided we fall.
On our own we’re nothing
Together we’re all.
A society is coordinated action, not a free for all, seeking individual recognition or the spoils of war. We build together but pull down the world through selfish ego. The Queen knew that and the Queen lived that reality but her detractors and those who attack the empire she was head of forget that. True people died because of this but also there are people who are alive today, who would not be because of the empire, including those that attack the monarchy now. Like a grim version of Monty Python and ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ We can only say forgive them lord for they know not what they do.
Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Sandy
James Lemons
1 year ago
I’ve heard it repeated we’ll never see her like again, and it’s true. True only because our secular values have atomised religion to something quaint and curious, where once it was grand and majestic.
Conventional liberalism will have the monarchy stripped to the same skeleton. It will only stop once the final Beefeater outfit is folded and left for the moths, and the last King James passage devalued to a modern, inclusive impression of our great language.
She was perhaps the last living person whose hand still held grip on the age gone before us. Now that grip has been relinquished, a new age leers back at us, one of gleaming glass and plastic, with all things ancient buried like treasure that will never be found.
Wonderfully stated. It seems like the passing of an age is now complete, sadly enough.
AC Harper
1 year ago
In a world where businesses come and go, High Streets are pedestrianised, public fashions flicker past, and bandwagons are rolled out, the Queen endured. I suspect it was not tradition that people turned out for but the appreciation of continuity.
David Bell
1 year ago
If it was a “Hajj”, then presumably Windsor is Mecca. Has Britain become that islamized?
Ian McKinney
1 year ago
Beautifully written piece. Bravo.
Mash Mallow
1 year ago
Sublime piece. Thank you Will.
Rip Your Majesty; my Commander in Chief.
John Bray
1 year ago
The Queen’s funeral has been an overt display of soft power. You have the trinity of the church, monarch and military the defenders of the Christian faith, consequently it would seem it is there is stille a zeal to convert the world to Christianity destroying indigenous cultures in its wake. This zeal that drove Empire and way back to the Crusades and beyond. Like Constantine the church is being used as control to place one ahead of the pack. It may be a little more subtle now but it is still happening and alive and kicking
“ … it would seem it is there is stille a zeal to convert the world to Christianity” im not sure converting is the what’s happening here. Why is it pride in one’s own culture is viewed as the destruction of another? No doubt this happened. But what do you have to prove a funeral today is proof this is still happening? Seeming, in your eyes, is proof of nothing.
Is there a zeal, or are you projecting your own burden of guilt for the actions of your ancestors’ upon a modern day Christian funeral?
Yesterday was all the more solemn as it could be one of the final throes of Christianity’s demise in Britain.
I’m sure The Queen possessed more faith in her little finger nail than any of her family or the population at large.
The British Empire, while not perfect, was far less cruel and far more beneficial than other European empires.
I fail to see how last Monday’s observances were anything other than an enactment of the culture of the United Kingdom, indigenous for over a thousand years.
He apparently believes that only certain empires should be allowed to thrive and conquer, and is unaware that the history of mankind is nothing more than empire building and war.
Her life was blockaded by duty. She seemed to ask nothing of us but to do ours too.
Ah yes, duty, that four letter word, turn away in embarrassment when you utter it. In this brave, new,modern world we have no need of old-fashioned ideas like duty, pietas, dharma, these are for the poor benighted heathens who have yet to awaken to this glorious new era. If such a thing does exist at all today it is a duty to oneself and oneself alone, why should we blockade ourselves with a duty to serve others?
Splendid, thank you.
Reason enough why the political class can only scratch their heads in wonderment at these strange going-ons. Thank you Linda.
Duty and service are very much alive in those of us who have had the privilege to serve in the armed forces and many of us are Christians not heathens either. We continue to try and live by those principles in subsequent civilian employment, which is why we rail at some many of our colleagues and trades people who so often espouse a creed of “good enough to get by”. We have her Majesty to thank for that. Did I see a few Heads of States shifting uncomfrotably in their seats in the Abbey, when they realised during the Archbishop’s address just how far short they fell of her Majesty’s standards of behaviour and how unlikely it was that they would be remebered thus?
Listened to the ghastly Trudeau talking about the late Queen. How marvellous their “little chats” were. How well she listened. Well, yup, a clear contrast to a PM who long ago stopped listening to his citizens.
Unutterable creep.
If I ever attend a fancy dress party again, I’m going to black up and go as Trudeau.
Sorry, I mean Black up.
One od the few groups of people who still have any conception of duty and honour (by honour I don’t mean killing your sister).
I thought his sermon was rather pointed, too; they should have squirmed.
I hopr they did it made me laugh to contemplate it.
Yet Welby is hardly qualified to give moralising sermons to others.
I have missed something; why is he not qualified?
Reasons too numerous to list. Just google ‘Justin Welby controversies’ to find out.
I do hope so, I was looking but they were not in shot.
Because on that is everything good founded. Putting the other before oneself is the core of civilisation. That you (no doubt ironically) feel obliged to state the mantra of others requires a response, hopefully the one that you believe.
I bet more than 30% would agree today the Elizabeth was chosen by God. We are not so different from our grandparents. Those people that Orwell famously described as preferring to be caught stealing from the poor box than standing to attention for the national anthem were around in the 1930s as now.
Can you explain why God only chooses a monarch from the same family?
God chose the best brother from the family, didn’t he?
I wouldn’t dare to presume to explain His actions.
Sacred Mystery..
History shows otherwise, no?
Our Monarchs haven’t all come from a single dynasty.
A bit late to your rain shower, sorry. It’s because being a child of a father and mother is a definite fact, whereas the perceived goodness of individual politicians is by no means such an undiluted fact. Hereditary choice stops endless years, nay decades, of wrangling. Why that mother and father and child (well, why any mother, father or child. It doesnt matter)?
One of the good things about life which makes it easier is that certain things are beyond our choice (looks, intelligence, bodily health, likeability). Therefore the only thing to do with them is accept them as unchangeable ‘givens’ of living and continue on.
So disposing of that as the least interesting of questions, we move to consider what protections we have, constitutionally, against the said child of such mothers and fathers, and the answer is: “Quite a few, actually”.
Best line in the essay. “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”.
Why Hajj? What on earth is wrong with you people?
Precisely. A Hajj is an event where people get trampled to death running round a stone and worshipping a murdering paedo. How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.
You’ve spent a little time on earth and haven’t learnt anything. Sorry for your loss.
One feels there is a fundmental bitterness on the part of the author ….
Indeed, a totally inappropriate analogy.
All he intended, was that it was a pilgrimage, but that word is much abused. A sacred rite, a duty, something done once in a lifetime
I know what he meant. The use of the word was so unnecessary, but he and the editors chose to use it. There’s no explanation for using a word that’s at odds with the subject of the story and the people reading it. They are either being very pretentious (some sort of intellectual superiority, or daring, with language), or just plain stupid. In the end they’re just stupid.
I’m not so sure. Haj didn’t give me a moment’s cognitive dissonance. A good anologue of bovine, non-critical, non-thinking mass hysteria and the same baying and spitting outrage if anyone dares to criticise it.
I know what I’m writing is unfashionable, especially amongst those that feel old, angry, past it, ignored and irrelevant – but being rational and reasoning seems to be a bit passé at the moment.
Cling on to your old symbols if you must – but the rest of the world cracks on with modernity while too many of us back in Blighty wallow in misplaced exceptionalism.
A charming evocation of an extraordinary time. But words matter and this wasn’t a Hajj. Britain is still a Christian country, as the Queen’s obsequies demonstrated. Christians go on Pilgrimage, even today and in larger numbers than the media understand: to the Holy Land, Rome, Compostela, Walsingham, Lourdes, Guadelupe, and many other devotional destinations.
Use of such words is intended to deliberately inflame, and are best ignored.
I’m convinced that Will Lloyd makes up many of his so-called examples of what actually happens on the ground, to fit his narrative. This article isn’t the first example of this. My view is that his contributions are deliberate click-bait by Unherd. Poor quality, sanctimonious and in former times might just scrape a third at an unranked university, if the marker was drunk.
I think you are right. His “Thud of pom-poms – they go pom-pom-pom not thud. Like the American reporter (NY Times?) on “Jan 06” was going on about the thud of concussion grenades.
This was a good article, but marred by the title and the sentence “A unique British Hajj.”
English has a perfectly good word – “pilgrimage”, which is nothing like a Hajj, and it is completely wrong to associate the Queen’s funeral in any way with a vile and inhuman ideology – I won’t dignify it with the word “religion” – whose so-called prophet was a mass murderer and a violator of little girls.
Islam is a disgusting ideology, which has brought misery to every country it has infested. And it treats women far worse than animals. No Muslim country would allow a woman to be head of state – in many such countries she has no freedom at all.
Hang on a minute; is this the Daily Mail comments section?
For a moment there, I thought you were talking about the British Empire. Sorry – my bad. It’s just comedy, masquerading as bigoted nonsense. Great joke – razor sharp irony. Well done.
“ … the monarch was simply “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”.
Maybe that’s true. When Elizabeth was crowned, one third of the people believed she was chosen by God. Is that figure correct? It seems to me to be on the low side, I imagine it was a lot more.
”The imperfectly educated” needed something simple to understand. But I don’t think the idea of a Queen being chosen by God is necessarily simple, or that believing in it is simple. The idea of the Queen as a visible symbol of unity is very sophisticated. These are the people, her people, and she their Queen. They both understood that relationship, which is why they poured into the streets. So yes, a symbol. But not so simple. It’s a symptom of the age to turn this relationship into something merely symbolic, or meaningless; the modern mind, always doubting what it sees.
“The imperfectly educated”? “God has chosen the ‘foolish’ to confound the wise”. 1 Corinthians 1v27
I’m one of the “imperfectly educated”, as I have always seen her as a symbol of this nation. I could never see any politician as such, even if I voted for him or her, as perhaps half the population did not.
I agree; someone who has been elected by part of the nation cannot represent the whole nation as can an unelected head of state.
Together we stand
Divided we fall.
On our own we’re nothing
Together we’re all.
A society is coordinated action, not a free for all, seeking individual recognition or the spoils of war. We build together but pull down the world through selfish ego. The Queen knew that and the Queen lived that reality but her detractors and those who attack the empire she was head of forget that. True people died because of this but also there are people who are alive today, who would not be because of the empire, including those that attack the monarchy now. Like a grim version of Monty Python and ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ We can only say forgive them lord for they know not what they do.
I’ve heard it repeated we’ll never see her like again, and it’s true. True only because our secular values have atomised religion to something quaint and curious, where once it was grand and majestic.
Conventional liberalism will have the monarchy stripped to the same skeleton. It will only stop once the final Beefeater outfit is folded and left for the moths, and the last King James passage devalued to a modern, inclusive impression of our great language.
She was perhaps the last living person whose hand still held grip on the age gone before us. Now that grip has been relinquished, a new age leers back at us, one of gleaming glass and plastic, with all things ancient buried like treasure that will never be found.
Wonderfully stated. It seems like the passing of an age is now complete, sadly enough.
In a world where businesses come and go, High Streets are pedestrianised, public fashions flicker past, and bandwagons are rolled out, the Queen endured. I suspect it was not tradition that people turned out for but the appreciation of continuity.
If it was a “Hajj”, then presumably Windsor is Mecca. Has Britain become that islamized?
Beautifully written piece. Bravo.
Sublime piece. Thank you Will.
Rip Your Majesty; my Commander in Chief.
The Queen’s funeral has been an overt display of soft power. You have the trinity of the church, monarch and military the defenders of the Christian faith, consequently it would seem it is there is stille a zeal to convert the world to Christianity destroying indigenous cultures in its wake. This zeal that drove Empire and way back to the Crusades and beyond. Like Constantine the church is being used as control to place one ahead of the pack. It may be a little more subtle now but it is still happening and alive and kicking
“ … it would seem it is there is stille a zeal to convert the world to Christianity”
im not sure converting is the what’s happening here. Why is it pride in one’s own culture is viewed as the destruction of another? No doubt this happened. But what do you have to prove a funeral today is proof this is still happening? Seeming, in your eyes, is proof of nothing.
Is there a zeal, or are you projecting your own burden of guilt for the actions of your ancestors’ upon a modern day Christian funeral?
Yesterday was all the more solemn as it could be one of the final throes of Christianity’s demise in Britain.
I’m sure The Queen possessed more faith in her little finger nail than any of her family or the population at large.
The British Empire, while not perfect, was far less cruel and far more beneficial than other European empires.
Rather more beneficial I suggest than the Ottoman Empire as it subjected and enslaved half of Europe.
I fail to see how last Monday’s observances were anything other than an enactment of the culture of the United Kingdom, indigenous for over a thousand years.
He apparently believes that only certain empires should be allowed to thrive and conquer, and is unaware that the history of mankind is nothing more than empire building and war.