“We all feel a bit motherless today,” wrote Henry James after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. And that’s the feeling lots of people have as they line up along the route of the Queen’s coffin today to salute the longest reigning monarch. Victoria had reigned from the age of 18 to 81; the Queen from the age of 26 to 96. By the time you’ve been that long on the throne, you’re part of people’s settled idea of how the world is. For decades we, like the Victorians, have lived under a queen who, as Henry James observed of Victoria, “held the nation safe and warm under the fold of her big, hideous, Scotch plaid shawl”. Take out the shawl and it resembles Britain under her great, great granddaughter.
What’s been remarkable is that our fast-moving culture is capable of a 10-day period of mourning. Granted, some people are restive and want to get back to business but on the whole we’ve accepted, welcomed even, the sombre mood this week: the black windows at Fortnum’s, the pictures of the Queen at bus stops, the cancelled parties, the absence of rows at PMQs (anyone miss that?). Contemporary culture isn’t terribly good at mourning, which is really a time for taking stock of a changed reality, but this week, the events associated with the Queen’s death are what we want to know about and talk about.
