Moving (On)
Long live the king, I guess
I am weeping for the death of a woman I never met; a woman I could never have met. A stranger I knew intimately.
I’ve known her name almost as long as I’ve known anyone’s. I’ve seen her face every day of my life. The media has shown me almost every aspect of her existence: inter alia, I know how she liked her cauliflower cheese prepared.
I’m not special in that regard; I’m just British. All but a handful of Brits knew her all their lives, and of those who didn’t, most had a birthday card from her. Some of us liked her, some didn’t.
I did. I was raised to, and later I chose to. The raising was because many of my extended family have worked for her at one time or another: not in the preening palace flunkey way, but in the tired, terrified, killing and dying in the mud and sand kind of way. The choosing was from admiration for her sense of duty… an admiration I was also raised to.
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and a dozen other conquered and colonized nations, inherited a role her father had thrust upon him, and she performed it every day for seventy years. She performed it in pampered luxury, with advantages most of her subjects could only dream of. But luxury and advantage never propelled anyone out of bed and off to work; only duty could do that. She didn’t always perform her duty perfectly: there were missteps. Mostly, they were the missteps of a mother putting her children’s reputations before her own.
Those who didn’t like her tended to focus on the luxury and the missteps; those of us who did, on her life of service. There was more service than slip-ups, but more sumptuous splendour than either. The simple fact is we are British: we have a monarch, and for seventy years she was it. Beyond that, things get complicated by morality and politics, neither of which seem like an appropriate subject for discussion over an old lady’s deathbed.
I liked Queen Elizabeth II, and I respected her. I have little time for the children whose reputations she put first.
The nature of monarchy is persistence, not consistency. Long live King Charles III, I suppose.
