UK Edition
She was always there. For most of us she has never not been there. Part of the scenery, a fixture in the firmament, certain as the sun rising in the east. Our Queen. Changing with the times, ever just the same.
There are no soldiers left who swore an oath of loyalty to a King. Four of the last five prime ministers were born after her accession. The longest-reigning monarch. The face that launched a billion bank notes, the stamp on every letter, the silhouette of the national self. Our Queen.
Did we come to believe she was immortal? (Maybe, but only because the alternative was unthinkable.) We can’t quite imagine life without her. To be honest, we aren’t absolutely certain who we are without her. For the best part of a century, if anyone asked, ‘What kind of country is this?’ there was no need to search for an answer, for there she was. Our Queen.
The death of a very old lady is hardly unexpected and yet millions of us will be experiencing profound shock and a strange, unsettling sorrow. Men, women and children on the way to work or school, sitting on a bus, buying a coffee, just talking to a friend on the phone, may find themselves surprised by tears.
There will be a need to congregate, to sign books of condolence, to bear witness, to pay respects, to share the loss. This is what history feels like. For the next 10 days, we will be living through one of its great, heart-stopping caesuras as a creamy vellum page is turned. None of us will ever forget where we were when we heard the news.
In the grave, beautiful words of the Clerk of the Privy Council, ‘It has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth the Second of blessed and glorious memory.’ The prime minister, among the first to be told of Her Majesty’s death, was alerted by the code ‘London Bridge is down’. That feels about right, doesn’t it?
An iconic feature of the British landscape has gone for good and now we are left to mourn, but also to marvel at the unspoken bond between a sovereign and her subjects. Since we were small, we were taught to ask God to save her, to make her happy and glorious and long to reign over us. That prayer was answered. Answered so well, in fact, that for nigh on seven decades she could be taken entirely for granted.
Her record-breaking reign was both a time of unprecedented change and remarkable stability. That security, the underlying sense that all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, was her greatest gift to us. Only now that her reign is over can we fully appreciate our good fortune.
The Queen’s life story has acquired the archetypal force of fairy tale. There was flighty Uncle David, the weak, vain King Edward VIII, who fell under the spell of wicked witch Wallis Simpson, allowing the country to be rescued by the good princess.
Elizabeth was 10 years and eight months old when she found out that her life would not be her own. Thanks to the abdication, and barring her parents producing a male heir, she knew that, one day, she would be Queen. Her maternal grandmother swore that, every night, Lilibet knelt by her bed and prayed for a baby brother, but never again did she give any sign that the role daunted or scared her.
Destiny’s child had ‘an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant’, according to Winston Churchill, who would become the first of her 14 prime ministers.
On her 21st birthday, in April 1947, Princess Elizabeth made a broadcast to the British Commonwealth and Empire that was to define everything that followed. ‘It is very simple,’ she said, ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.’
At more than 70 years’ distance, the clipped voice, fluting with nerves, sounds impossibly posh – she says ‘thenk you’ and ‘heppy’. No one talks like that any more. What endures, and I find it hard to hear it without crying, is the commitment to duty.
In her clear-eyed candour, she was more like a novitiate nun renouncing the vanity of the world to pursue a vocation. We have grown accustomed to the promises of politicians, which are written in hot air, but this one was for keeps. How lucky we were. The monarchy, which has thrown up some prize popinjays and prats down the centuries, gave these isles in those exhausted post-war years an enchantingly serious, lovely young woman who became a symbol of the hope that the country had fought for.
It mattered a good deal for the stature of our future Queen, trained to change spark plugs in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, that she had lived through what she called the ‘terrible and glorious years of the Second World War’. It only added lustre to the myth that, on VE Day, an incognito princess was carried on a wave of euphoria to Trafalgar Square.
Like Cinderella in reverse, at the end of the night she had to put away normal clothes and return to the Palace. Every fairy tale needs its handsome prince. When it came to finding a husband, though, Elizabeth could echo Portia in The Merchant of Venice: ‘In terms of choice I am not solely led/By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes/Besides, the lottery of my destiny/Bars me the right of voluntary choosing.’
Except Lilibet was 13 when she first saw a blond naval cadet who looked like a god who had just strolled down off Mount Olympus. And nice direction of a rather determined maiden’s eye ended in a love match with Prince Philip. In a long and disciplined life, choosing a penniless, tricky foreigner was the Queen’s single act of rebellion, but even that turned out to be a sensible move.
Her husband became a crucial part of her success; his certainty boosted her confidence, his impatience modernised a calcified Court, his presence made the person doing the loneliest job in the world less alone. Plus, the Queen could remain beyond reproach while it was the Duke of Edinburgh making all those ‘gaffes’ and providing covering fire for her.
‘Quite simply, my strength and stay all these years,’ she said of him on their golden wedding anniversary in 1997. Some of the happiest photos are of her bursting out laughing at something the Duke just said that he shouldn’t have. As newlyweds in Malta, Philip pursued his naval career and Elizabeth enjoyed playing house.
With the birth of Charles, a son and heir, in 1948, life looked good and was made even better when they completed a pigeon pair two years later with their daughter, Anne. But the lease on normality was short. On Tuesday, 2 June, 1953, Elizabeth was crowned Queen.
More than half the population watched the Coronation on television, a spellbinding novelty that showed Britons their new monarch in her ceremonial finery. The Crown looked too weighty on that girlish head, but she had practised walking in it and the robes that were heavier than a marine’s full kit for hour after hour, up and down the throne room in Buckingham Palace, until she had the ceremony by heart.
It helped that she was young and that she and her people would grow and learn together. The awe was tempered by protectiveness. It was raining – of course it was raining – but nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of the crowds for what the sociologist Michael Young called ‘an act of national communion… one family knit together with another in one great national family through identification with monarchy’.
The Queen’s subjects in Papua New Guinea put it more concisely: ‘Mama belong big family.’ It mattered, too, that she was a woman. Although the Queen would never have thought of herself as a feminist, her success as a wise, steadying counsel to 15 prime ministers was the greatest possible subliminal advert for female power.
In a newspaper column of 1952, one writer argued that, ‘If, as many earnestly pray, the accession of Elizabeth II can help to remove the last shreds of prejudice against women aspiring to the highest places, then a new era for women will indeed be at hand’. It must have worked. The columnist’s name was Margaret Thatcher. Those are the facts of the Queen’s early life.
We can all, to some extent, recite the highs and the lows of the years that followed. The first scandal was Princess Margaret being denied permission to marry a divorcee (a bitter irony since three of the monarch’s four children ended up divorced, a source of immense pain to such a devout Christian).
But the Queen herself had exceptional steadiness of character and rarely put a foot wrong. The errors of seven decades in the limelight you can count on one hand. Astonishing, really. Undoubtedly, the closest she came to disaster was in 1997 when she stayed at Balmoral after the death of Princess Diana, not understanding that she needed to provide a focal point for public grief.
The reticence and strict adherence to protocol that had served her so well were a handicap in this new blurty, more emotional age. ‘Show us you care,’ demanded the Express.
For a few days, republicanism crackled like static in the London air until the Queen came home to the Palace and made a broadcast to the nation. In her uniform of mourning – black dress with pearls and wonderful diamond brooch – she spoke of the overwhelming expressions of sadness.
‘So, what I say to you now, as your Queen, and as a grandmother, I say from my heart,’ she said. The speech was touching enough to appease the vast, restless crowd you could glimpse through the window behind her, but that ‘as your Queen’ had a reproving glint of steel. Elizabeth had never stooped to conquer, and she never would.
Whenever her people felt let down, she made cautious adjustments while cleaving to Elizabeth I’s motto, semper eadem – always the same, which doesn’t mean dull, though some accused her of that. Brenda was Private Eye’s nickname for her. They weren’t the only ones to mock or patronise.
‘Duchesses find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal,’ one snobby critic opined. Perhaps they did. But she suited the rest of us down to the ground. The British mistrust intellectuals and show-offs. If Her Majesty started the day with the Racing Post (and The Daily Telegraph) and preferred horses and dogs to humans, then that endeared her to a nation of animal lovers.
The 30 corgis she kept throughout her life (starting with Susan, who came on honeymoon, obviously) became a Royal trademark. We liked that she was frugal, with a hopeless two-bar electric fire valiantly attempting to defrost the room where she received guests at Buckingham Palace.
If she mainly stuck to cheerful block colours for public appearances, that was because being visible to her people was more important than style. Besides, if the Queen wasn’t à la mode, it meant she never went out of fashion. While glitzier monarchies fell into disrepute, our Tupperware model went from strength to strength.
By subtle deployment of the three Ds – duty, decency, diligence – she silenced the republican cause for as long as she lived. Even those who despised the monarchical system couldn’t help but admire the Queen. Did we really know her? I don’t think we did, but that’s rather the point. Elizabeth II was the most photographed woman in history, but she remained an enigma until the end, and this was key to her success. Our Queen.
As she got older, we loved her more. What we may once have perceived as coldness became a priceless inability to fake emotion. While others debased their standards in pursuit of celebrity, the Queen held back.
We never envied other countries with their passing parade of presidents because we knew that we had her, the incorruptible, the most loyal, the best. Our Queen.
During her long reign, the United Kingdom may have moved from instinctive deference to raucous scepticism, from imperial giant to service provider, but the Queen continued to believe in us. Every Christmas, in her broadcast, she urged upon us ‘all those individual instances of kindness and respect’ and brought us back, quietly but insistently, to the Christian faith that sustained her.
‘It is very simple,’ she said all those years ago, ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.’ But it wasn’t simple, was it? Turning yourself into a living symbol isn’t simple.
A young woman vowing to repress every selfish impulse, tread down all unruly feelings and dedicate herself to an abstract ideal of nationhood on behalf of millions of people isn’t simple. But she did it. Our Queen.
Alas, she isn’t here today, in black dress, pearls, wonderful diamond brooch, to explain to us how to deal with the unfathomable void that her death leaves.
But, if we look back at the address she gave to the nation after her mother died, I reckon we get a strong sense of how she would want us to be: ‘At the ceremony tomorrow, I hope that sadness will blend with a wider sense of thanksgiving, not just for her life but for the times in which she lived – a century for this country and the Commonwealth not without its trials and sorrows, but also one of extraordinary progress, full of examples of courage and service as well as fun and laughter… I thank you from my heart for the love you gave her during her life and the honour you now give her in death. May God bless you all.’
Close your eyes and you will always see her, stepping out of a car, gloved hand extended, accepting a posy from a child, a smile that lit up that Hanoverian face, handbag in the crook of her arm, placing one court shoe in front of the other, keeping her promise to serve until her last breath. Our Queen.
Britain may have changed but the Queen remained the same – dedicated, incorruptible and loyal
Only now that our remarkable monarch is gone can we appreciate just how fortunate we were to have her