The death of Elizabeth II marks the end of an era
It deprives Britain of a thread that wove the nation together, and linked it to its past
Sep 8th 2022The queen is dead. The second Elizabethan era is over. In the hours and days to come, the royal family will do what it does best, and mask uncertainty and emotion with ritual and pageantry. There will be flags at half mast; ceremonies will unspool; bells will toll. But for now, there is unease.
It is hard to imagine Britain without Queen Elizabeth II partly because almost everyone has only known it with her. She died at the age of 96 having come to the throne at the age of 25. The end of her reign will be marked with superlatives. Elizabeth II was Britain’s oldest and longest-reigning monarch. She featured on more currencies than any other living figure. Hers was perhaps the most reproduced image in history.
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• Film: Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in numbersShe was also the first monarch of the modern media era. Her coronation in 1953 was the first to be televised; in 1976 she became Britain’s first monarch to send an email. Her subjects knew more about her than about any previous monarch. They knew that before her coronation she had worn her crown at breakfast, to accustom herself to its weight. They watched her crowned in her finery and knew that, beforehand, she had to strip to her shift to be anointed with holy oil.
The relationship between commoner and queen is one of great distance and odd intimacies. You bow before your monarch, and yet you hold their head in your hand, and use it to pay for potatoes. Elizabeth II brought a new kind of intimacy. The Victorians believed that to survive, the monarchy must keep its distance: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.” During her reign, not only daylight but flashlights were let in. It did not always go well. In 1997, when Diana—pursued by paparazzi—died in a Paris tunnel, Elizabeth was in turn pursued by a media who scented less blood than bloodlessness.
Time and again Elizabeth was stripped to her shift by the media—and for a while neither crown nor subjects coped. Royal and remote, with her headscarves and clipped vowels, she seemed like a woman out of time. Each person is an anachronism in their own era, and monarchs more than most. Elizabeth’s uncle, the abdicating Edward VIII, wrote that he was “a Prince trained in the manners and maxims of the nineteenth century for a life that had all but disappeared by the end of his youth”. The young Elizabeth went for lessons in a school built in the medieval era (Eton), using a book written in the Victorian one (Bagehot’s “English Constitution”), and was instructed by a tutor so used to teaching male students that he addressed the young princess as “gentlemen”.
Small wonder then that Elizabeth’s values—of stoicism and duty, of keeping calm and carrying on, and above all of shutting up—were those of another era. Under the dazzle of the modern media gaze such old-fashioned values looked dun-coloured. While her children, grandchildren and in-laws emoted in interviews and misbehaved, she buttoned her lip and stepped on planes and trains and boats. She criss-crossed the country and the Commonwealth, listening, waving, weaving her lands together and asking: “Have you come far?” Few had come further than she. When, at the cop26 summit last year, she tutted at those who “talk, but don’t do” it seemed a heartfelt comment from a woman who, for a lifetime, had done but not talked.
As the media age became the social-media age, empathy mellowed harsh judgment. The mood towards her shifted. Her silence, which had seemed an unfashionable anachronism, started to seem prescient, even refreshing. As the currency that bore her profile declined, and as Britain became diminished, her stock stayed high. Donald Trump longed for a state visit; Michelle Obama put her arm around her.
And now she has gone. Walter Bagehot—that Victorian whose book Elizabeth studied—once wrote that monarchy “acts as a disguise” allowing a nation “to change without heedless people knowing it”. By living so long, Elizabeth offered the illusion of stability to a nation that was in truth changing markedly. Her predecessor-but-one, Edward VIII, who was born in an era of square-rigged sailing ships and died in the era of nuclear warheads, wrote that so much had changed so fast he felt “as if I have been travelling through history in a time machine”.
The time-machine continued hurtling. Elizabeth II leaves a country, and Commonwealth, very different from those she inherited. When she acceded to the throne the vestiges of imperial power lingered; the afterglow of victory in the second world war was still warm. Now Britain is no more than a regional power in the North Atlantic; secession is threatened on all sides; the Commonwealth, unravelling already, looks likely to unravel still further without her. With her death a final thread that tethered Britain to an era of greatness has been cut.
Few feel confident that the monarchy will thrive without her. Many fear Charles will not be up to the job. He has said too much, too much of it self-pitying: the Prince of Wails. But in recent years he too has mellowed. Some of the topics on which he has thumped the tub longest, notably the environment, now seem less like the obsessions of a crank. And the Windsors have always had an instinct for survival: it is in their very name. They used to be called the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. But in June 1917, “Gotha” bombers launched a raid on London and 18 children in a primary school were killed. That month the royal family changed its name to Windsor.
The old order changeth
King Charles’s role is not an easy one. Waiting in the wings is tough, and the corollary of the world’s longest-reigning monarch is the world’s longest heir-apparent. Hers was a hard act to follow and people wonder whether he can. In truth, there is no reason why he should. She moulded the monarchy to her character, and longevity made idiosyncrasy seem like orthodoxy.
Change is possible. Indeed, the coinage of the realm virtually demands it. Ever since the Restoration in the 17th century, it has been customary for each British monarch to face the opposite way to the predecessor, perhaps to symbolise that each will do it their way. George VI faced to the left; Elizabeth II, to the right; and now Charles to the left again. Change, and continuity, continuity and change, minted into metal. ■
