THE Queen is now at rest alongside her beloved husband, parents and sister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The orb, sceptre and crown were removed from her coffin in a moving ceremony yesterday that brought her reign to a close. The flags are now flying at full mast. Parliament has returned. The police from all over the country who came to help the Met with the policing of the funeral events have returned home.
We are left with the memory of yesterday’s resonant funeral service at Westminster Abbey, which was so full of pomp and ceremony, and the splendid music of the Abbey. It was also a moving farewell to a much-loved Queen by her people and her family.
And yet, as the barricades are taken up that contained the crowds which thronged to catch a glimpse of her coffin, things are not quite as they were. Something changed during the 10 days of mourning that followed the Queen’s death.
There was for a little over a week, a suspension of business as usual; there was an atmosphere of civility between our political leaders and among the people who gathered in their thousands at various points during the week. The crowds were almost all cheerful and tolerant, not least the people in the miles-long line waiting to pay their respects at the Queen’s lying-in-state — the high point of that British institution, the queue. It was as if the Queen in death had brought out the best in us. Something of the values she embodied were expressed in her address to the Women’s Institute at Sandringham and they are worth remembering now.
“As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture. To me, these approaches are timeless, and I commend them to everyone.”
We could do worse than take these sentiments into the new reign.
We shall not forget
The remarkable assembly of crowned heads, national leaders and presidents from all over the world who came together for the funeral was the kind of gathering that we are unlikely to witness again in our lifetime. But then we shall not see a monarch like Elizabeth II again: with her, one of the last of the war generation, we also bade farewell to an era.
The world leaders gathered at Westminster Abbey came to pay tribute to the woman who represented and symbolised the country. She exercised brilliantly the intangible influence that we call soft power; another way of putting it is that she raised the country’s standing in the world, not least by her personal dignity, friendliness and integrity.
Let us hope that good came from the mingling of leaders at the funeral; diplomacy is, at heart, about the personal as well as the political and economic. And let us hope too that something of the sense of unity that prevailed in the country since her death may remain, in some form. A momentary increase in goodwill among nations and in unity in the country would be another happy legacy from the Queen.
We shall continue to miss her, very much. But we shall not forget her.
