The monarchy is less secure. Serge Lemoine/Getty
It seems that it should be a near spiritual ritual of Britishness to live through the end of the reign of one sovereign and the beginning of another. The emotions around the death of a monarch are, for those who feel them, central to what make us more than a vast number of people arbitrarily living together on an archipelago of islands. They strangely elevate us above the pleasures and travails of our daily lives. They connect us to others around the world who share our monarchy for reasons that might usually feel contingent, if not odd — but for a moment in time acquire a solemnity.
Elizabeth II’s incumbency was so enduring that any number of people lived lives here without such an experience. Now, her passing risks bequeathing something more akin to a shipwreck than a pre-ordained and pre-planned moment in time, the passage of which should bring, as well as grief, the solace of continuity. Britain has become a country in which we are part strangers. Precisely because the Queen prolonged a particular past, this week has been a temporal rupture.
In her spirit still lived her father and grandfather, the kings who, because of the two world wars, reigned over what was probably for the first time an overtly British nation-state, rather than a tenser union of once separate kingdoms. To mourn Elizabeth II is to mourn that 20th-century Britain. In reality, it was a short era. By the Seventies, something that fighting the two wars had created was already dissolving. But the last genuinely optimistic decade of 20th-century Britain tied the Queen to two iconic imaginative forces that still, in rather different ways, exercise their pull.
In the first, Bobby Moore, born in the East End during the Blitz, climbed the steps at Wembley, and, not wanting to dirty the Queen’s white gloves, wiped his hands, before she handed him the Jules Rimet Trophy. For English football, that summer afternoon has constituted an ideal of greatness against which everything since has fallen short, even as there are any number of ways in which football in Britain is more inclusive than it was on 30 July 1966. If the 56 years of hurt were to end in Qatar this winter, there would be no fusion of the club rituals of football at 3 o’clock on a Saturday with the national team’s victory, no way of avoiding the question of what the World Cup was doing being played in the middle of European domestic seasons in Qatar, and there would be English not Union flags flown in celebration. Much more likely, there will be more years to add to a song written for an occasion where attaining that ideal in the Queen’s presence seemed in touching distance.
The Beatles are the second vehicle of collective emotion, running from war to the Sixties, to which the Queen was connected. John Lennon was born during the Liverpool blitz and Paul McCartney’s parents met in an air raid shelter. They played as children on bombsites. Then, like the Queen in the Fifties, the Beatles became in the Sixties the new outward face of post-war Britain, even as the shadows of the older Britain ran through some of their best songs from A day in the life to Eleanor Rigby. McCartney said that growing up, the Queen seemed akin to a film star: someone it would be impossible for a working-class boy like him to meet. But he did. He’s now a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. As the Beatles were falling apart in 1968, McCartney, always at home in pre-rock and roll British musical culture, wrote a music-hall style ditty, “almost”, he said, “like a love song”, about the Queen. On Abbey Road, after he finishes singing “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”, there is a gap. Then the 23-second Her Majesty begins: the last sound on the last album the Beatles made.
The age of Queen Elizabeth II could not stop in the Sixties. Through the increasing political and economic fragmentation of the United Kingdom from the Seventies, the Queen served as an exemplary constitutional monarch. She might even be said to have practised denial in the face of what was changing: order being necessary, she knew that a public show of it is required from the person who bears witness to the underlying tumult.
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SubscribeThis article encompasses much that so many of us felt about the late Queen but might have been unsure how to express quite as lucidly as Prof. Thompson. The Queen was remarkable in manifold ways and sincerely loved by millions around the world because of the personal qualities she consistently displayed throughout her reign. She subsumed her individual being to the duty of office and to her peoples – and never faltered in so doing. If Napoleon was ever right then he was when he said that monarchy was the one device discovered by man for the curbing of money-power and, by extension I would say, political power. We can rest a little easier with such folk at the helm.
As a teenager in Adelaide in 1963 I first experienced monarchy in the person of the Queen when she attended a concert on a summer’s evening in Elder Park. It was life changing for from that moment on, unknowingly at the time, I became a monarchist. Emotion can often spur us on to discover and consider primal and ancient truths that might lurk below the surface of daily life. Whatever else one might say about hereditary constitutional monarchy there will always be an emotional element in its attraction partly because it stems from the most ancient of man’s governances and holds fast to truths of enduring quality and longevity not connected with contemporary ephemera.
This article encompasses much that so many of us felt about the late Queen but might have been unsure how to express quite as lucidly as Prof. Thompson. The Queen was remarkable in manifold ways and sincerely loved by millions around the world because of the personal qualities she consistently displayed throughout her reign. She subsumed her individual being to the duty of office and to her peoples – and never faltered in so doing. If Napoleon was ever right then he was when he said that monarchy was the one device discovered by man for the curbing of money-power and, by extension I would say, political power. We can rest a little easier with such folk at the helm.
As a teenager in Adelaide in 1963 I first experienced monarchy in the person of the Queen when she attended a concert on a summer’s evening in Elder Park. It was life changing for from that moment on, unknowingly at the time, I became a monarchist. Emotion can often spur us on to discover and consider primal and ancient truths that might lurk below the surface of daily life. Whatever else one might say about hereditary constitutional monarchy there will always be an emotional element in its attraction partly because it stems from the most ancient of man’s governances and holds fast to truths of enduring quality and longevity not connected with contemporary ephemera.
An extremely difficult act to follow; Charles is still settling in but he seems to understand.
It won’t be an easy task with the U.K. in turmoil politically and a son who is seemingly ignorant of the importance of the institution he represents.
A younger son…
A younger son…
An extremely difficult act to follow; Charles is still settling in but he seems to understand.
It won’t be an easy task with the U.K. in turmoil politically and a son who is seemingly ignorant of the importance of the institution he represents.