This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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I watched the older gentleman fumble with his ticket. A thick tie knot just short of his shirt’s top button spoke of a return to formality of dress for someone now long used to the comfortable sartorial consolations of retirement. He had a day Travelcard ­— the mark of someone who comes into London rarely and, in the surge at the barriers at Green Park Tube station, he mishandled it while  trying to balance a huge bunch of flowers. 

I looked back to see a staff member let him through with a smile. I noticed his eyes had the puffiness of recently-shed tears. He balanced the flowers, returned the ticket to a trouser pocket, and made his way towards the Mall.

We had both come, the older man and myself,  with thousands upon thousands of others, not to see the Queen, but to see the absence of the Queen. To see that she was not. Her death was not marked exactly like those of the Edwards, Georges, even a Victoria past. Whilst those ancient giants, Church and State, awoke from seven decades of slumber and moved surprisingly swiftly into the actions they have performed since the days of the Saxon Witan, the ordinary people of Britain and the world set about business. 

This mourning is of a different order

For, as the man selling roses for five pounds each in Green Park told me, that is what it is. This mourning is of a different order. It is a strange association between the woman who ruled over 150 million people with a fictional, Peruvian bear. It’s the servers of a Californian tech giant becoming clogged with images of her deceased consort welcoming her into Heaven. It’s the reams of cards and sheets of paper, all with personal messages she will never read, left by trees in the Royal parks. 

And, if truth be told, I was strangely moved by all of them, despite all the things I told myself about my faith and my hatred of mawkish sentimentality.

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Some vestiges of the old mourning remained. As I made my way back along Pall Mall. The Athenaeum was wreathed in black crepe, as it would have been to mark the passing of an Edward or a George. She, and those other august hangers-on to a mourning culture long gone were isolated patches of old ways amid a modern  outpouring of emotion. Like placing Lady Bracknell in the audition stages for The X-Factor c. 2006.

But you have read thousands of these snapshots, little postcards from London. The whole world is engaged in mass observation now. You will be bored of them. You know these stories. This framing, this event, vast though it seemed, is beginning to be processed. This is not an article just of snapshots, but one, I hope, that seeks to ask a question. What is interesting to me — as one who, when a parish priest, saw thousands of people mourn in perhaps a thousand different ways — is the question of how it is we mourn, or think we mourn, as a nation? What, in short, is the state of British mourning? Much will be written about the constitutional state of the nation, about the state of the crown, but what about the state of our mourning? How is it we bid our dead farewell? How do we grieve in 2022?

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When Brian Brindley, the bon liver and clergyman, died midway through his seven-course 70th birthday dinner at that very same Athenaeum, one guest observed that, though everybody felt they should have carried on eating regardless, the only person who would have actually considered doing so now lay dead in front of them. So it has proved with state mourning and Elizabeth II. 

The British public know, desire even, the distant dignity that the formal patterns of mourning in public entail. However, the only person who truly embodied that — strangely coherent in practice but inexplicable in theory — now lay in front of them, deceased. 

Mourning now cannot only be about public formality, but must also be about emotional release. To many in this nation and further afield, how we mourn has changed seismically in a generation. Now it is about showing proper emotional reaction. As the late Queen herself found out, we are now a society that values easy to interpret public displays of vulnerability as markers of key life moments. 

It is perhaps a result of us becoming more sensory in our approach to processing all information that we who desire visual and auditory stimulation  should want our emotional responses to contain it.  Life is not lived to the fullest unless it —  “we”— can show it is being lived. That means tears, statements from people or groups or businesses with no tangible link to the triumph or the loss, it means emotion that is not only processed intellectually or privately, but demonstrated and visceral. 

It requires embodiment in ways that speak not of careful consideration or protocol, but of a bubbling over of feeling. In Britain today, that means Paddington Bears alongside the Athenaeum’s black crepe. 

Is that a bad thing? On balance, I suspect not. I am undoubtedly emotionally repressed, the product of time and place, but I have seen the power of emotion. Acknowledging that power, especially when it is expressed in grief, is vital, healthy. It can be done, of course, without mawkishness, although that is a tricky rope to tread. 

I was not alone in surprise at the depth of my reaction

Obviously, I was not alone in my surprise at the depth of my reaction. Many republicans reported themselves confused by their tears. Plenty of rationalists expressed a barely-disguised frustration masked with incredulity at the fact that this event had affected them. This, though, was always the point of monarchy:  not to be logical but to be effective, or rather to be able to affect. It is the point of grief too.

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As I have watched the last few days, winced at the claps where claps formerly had not been and wondered about the role of the smartphone and the long shadow of Diana, it occurs to me that, despite the doubts of myself and others, this new mourning we have adopted works. By that I mean it has done what mourning is supposed to do, namely help an individual or a group to process their grief. The new perimeters have been subtly drawn, unwritten, like the constitution Elizabeth swore to uphold, but tangible and powerful nonetheless. Indeed more tangible and powerful because they are so. 

By these new rules, Center Parcs, with its closures, has overreacted. Most of our politicians, our new monarch and the small businesses on the high street of the market town where I live, with their prints of either the nation’s grandma or the glamourous Fifties icon in their windows, have reacted correctly. Small rules, but discernible ones. She would have liked that.

However, there are more echoes of mournings past than either the nostalgic purists or the advocates of relentless, grim modernity would care to admit. Some of our greatest monarchs died with very little interruption to the routine of the nation. Nobody closed Center Parcs — or, for those without a sense of the ridiculous, the hearty Regency equivalent — when George III slipped into eternity in a dark room in Windsor. 

Conversely, the passing of others was marked with even more mawkish sentimentality. The euthanising of George V was in part to deny the tabloids their danse macabre. The new mourning works mostly because, with some undoubted exceptions in application and tone, it is very similar to the old one.

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For on closer inspection, very much remains of the old mourning. The Athenaeum is not so lonely after all. Even the bishops of the Established church (not, I confess, the intellectual or sociological benchmarks they once were) expressed surprise at the “Christian” nature of the reception of the body. Dr Hoyle, the Dean of Westminster, (who is an intellectual and sociological benchmark) implored us, in the words of St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, “not to be sorry as men without hope”. In any other context, even one with ceremonial or national significance, people might have passed comment on the antiquity of the language and cadence, on the exclusivist Christian nature of the rites. But few did so, and none credibly.

But, to turn to the question which is raising blood pressure in the offices of that Anglophobe Beano, The New York Times, why? How is it that a nation — allegedly cynical and self-knowing, that has a “worst of both worlds” relationship with past and present — has been capable of releasing emotion in a way that works? 

Perhaps because it has at its heart a weird authenticity. It works because people feel it does. That will be confusing, even enraging, to a tiny percentage of the population and to residents of nations who feel the cold rational handovers of their federal republic are justifiable, supposedly more egalitarian pomp. 

In my experience, much of our mourning does reflect, on a personal and local level, the patterns we now go through for Elizabeth II. Formality does work. People like the old words and the old ways, as it reminds them of mournings and griefs past: griefs and mournings which they did get through, despite how they may feel now. That is a great advantage of tradition, especially at odd times; weirdly it reminds us that time moves on. Those traditional patterns always sit alongside individual, visceral grief. That we seem to have accidentally found some sort of balance between the two is no bad thing. It is very Elizabethan.