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.

Death always seems unreal, for all that it is the starkest of realities. And never can the death of a stranger have seemed more real, yet unreal, to most of us than that of Elizabeth II. For how many of us look back on our own lifetimes without always seeing her there in the background too? 

She was not a fairytale, however age-enchanted the ATS-uniformed young princess alongside Winston Churchill on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 1945 has long seemed to us. She was as real as anything that makes up the stuff of life. Thus we could be forgiven for loyally thinking that the Queen was permanent, beyond mortal constraint. But she has been called to what she knew to be her reward, and we make what we will of her life, the throne she sat on, and the service it meant.

We have had two sovereigns whose faith is absolute

We should be grateful that this Queen Elizabeth’s death and funeral did not suffer the distracting dirges that attached themselves to the previous Queen Elizabeth, her mother. Then, in the pomp of New Labour, the Queen Mother’s funeral was cast as a culture war of sorts, in which the ageing voices of threatened tradition sought to exert themselves — perhaps
they feared it would be their last rearguard action — against the claims of Blairite progress and modernisation. 

Those who, in advance of the event, assured us that Elizabeth II’s death would represent some sort of an end and a “psychic shock” for the nation were mistaken. The idea that the Queen’s demise would represent loss and defeat, a drawing down of blinds, has been proven triumphantly wrong by the smoothness and lack of controversy over the succession. Not the least of the triumphs of Elizabeth II’s incomparably long reign is the robust good health of the crown that she has securely passed onto Charles III.

The new King is of course to be applauded by virtue simply of being king. Many find the views he expressed as Prince of Wales profoundly congenial. But regardless, the perennial truth of the monarchy, and loyalty to it, is that He is King, right or wrong.

In the King, and the Queen before him, we have had two sovereigns whose faith is absolute. In his excellent sermon at Her Majesty’s funeral, the Archbishop of Canterbury praised the example the late Queen was able to set, in consequence of her Christian belief, trust and service. Famously, Princess Elizabeth, broadcasting from Cape Town on her twenty-first birthday, had vowed to serve country and empire, however long or short her life was to be. And nowhere else are the changes of the reign starker than in the countries she ruled over.

Perhaps opportunities were missed. Maybe princes and princesses should have gone on to be governors-general in her realms overseas while there was still scope locally to prevent the office degenerating into a bauble for politicians, or a seat for tokens and gestures. 

The King is politics, the king is the country

But the failures of empire, and the move from kindred states to states that shared a monarch, were set in train long before the Queen came to the throne. In arresting them through personal magnetism, by doing so much to give a life that the Commonwealth of Nations would not have had without her, Elizabeth II did for her peoples what a good sovereign always should do, but so rarely does. She provided a level of legitimacy and stability to places which many states lacking her head on stamps or notes had so much cause to envy. 

Her youth at accession, yet astonishing constancy thereafter, touches the reign with the aura of magic. Much was demanded of the Queen in her life, and with love and joy she did what was asked of her. To the end of her life, the Queen grieved for the happy family — “the four of us”, in King George VI’s words — that she lost with her father’s early death. Her fortitude in carrying a burden she never sought is therefore part of what speaks to all, as it did for seventy years.

“Elizabeth the Good” is who we had as Queen. We will not see her like again, and a part of our lives has gone with her. But the King who reigns in her place is inescapably her parting gift to us. Fifteen realms share one sovereign, and each face their own destiny. To do so with a unifying idea ruling over them — be it a paper constitution or a volkische ideal — rather than simply a man or woman is to dream. And in too many other countries, to dwell in a republic has been to live through a nightmare. 

In the United Kingdom, efforts have been made, from the aggrandising Supreme Court to the cynical and shabby authors of the Cabinet Manual, to reduce the sovereign to being a cypher. That is an idea no different to that which any constitution or conniving bureaucrat would play around with elsewhere. 

But the King is politics, the king is the country, and others besides, as the King is us. God save him, and all honour to his mother.