There are dates that generations of British schoolchildren remember: 1066 – the battle of Hastings; 1215 – the sealing of Magna Carta; 1588 – the defeat of the Spanish Armada; and the outbreak of the world wars in 1914 and 1939. Now, we add 2022 to that list: the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning monarch in British history.
Hers was a funeral like none seen before. Indeed, a monarch’s funeral has never been televised before and so, like the Queen’s coronation, it breaks new ground. The Queen’s reign has been bookended by seminal moments for a global audience. Yet amid the innovation and colour, this was a day weighty with historical moment, with echoes of the past and pointers to the future. The decision for the young Prince George and Princess Charlotte to walk behind the coffin was explained by the palace as making the occasion about the future as much as the past.
As a historian of modern monarchy, the day has been disorienting and bewildering, observing how a centuries-old institution retains such affection and, in some sense, relevance. The address of Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, pointing to the Queen as an exemplar of a kind of “loving service” absent from many leaders, was pointed and poignant. Today’s funeral marked the end of something we shall never see again. Certainly, a monarch reigning for more than 70 years, but also a monarch who in a modern media age of populism and celebrity retained an echo of the mystical, age-old, divine right of kings. Her elusive charisma made her both known and unknown. Her death doubtless marks the end of a belief in the sanctity of the body of an individual cast by accident of birth into a role unearned and then anointed as God’s chosen one.
A monarch’s funeral has not been held at Westminster Abbey since 1760 (notwithstanding the Queen Mother’s in 2002) but, aware of the numbers of people who would want to attend, the Queen signed off arrangements that would see a 2,000-strong congregation come together at the abbey, before a smaller committal service at St George’s, Windsor. Observing the anomaly of monarchy 150 years ago, the constitutional writer Walter Bagehot described the necessary appeal to heart rather than head. It is the emotional, ceremonial and familial that appeal to the public’s affection. Those ingredients were woven through the services today – and again on television, social media and the faces of the people watching at home or at public screenings or on the procession route. It was clear that to many, the Queen embodied the kind of transcendent, magical and mystical idea of monarchy as her medieval predecessors.
In the choreography of these past 11 days, the Queen has ensured the monarchy once more evolves for the modern media age. She understood, as did Queen Victoria who had the first public royal funeral, that the monarchy needed to be public in life and in death. That she had to be seen to be believed, as she once said. Funerals, as with coronations, are moments for the nation to come together and make collective memories and reaffirm their attachment to the family of monarchy. The days of lying in state streamed 24/7 on rolling news programmes have ensured that the British monarchy has remained centre stage in the UK and around the world.
For me, the moment when the imperial crown, representing the sovereignty of the nation, and the orb and sceptre, representing spiritual and temporal power, were removed from the coffin, and so from Elizabeth for the last time, was the moment when my expertise abandoned me. In that instance, I became not a professor of the history of modern monarchy, but a disoriented fortysomething who, at least in that moment, witnessed the breaking of the spell: the shattering of the magic of monarchy that I have often described but had always assumed I was quite immune to. Today, the funeral and burial of Queen Elizabeth II uprooted something. The succession is secure, but with the Queen’s passing, the monarchy’s place and purpose, for better or worse, less so.
Anna Whitelock is professor of the history of monarchy at City, University of London and a royal commentator
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