Marina Hyde highlights the unpredictability of mass grief and how those at the centre of power can be unnerved by spontaneous public emotions (Britain could plan for the Queen’s death – but not for the risky tides of public feeling, 9 September). This observation is fair enough in so far as it goes. But we need to look into the nature of the events that inspire such emotions, rather than at the emotions themselves.
The Queen’s death marks a transition between two stable states: that of her own long reign and that of the reign of her son, Charles, that has now begun. Events over the past few days are designed to create stability in an otherwise unstable liminal phase that will last until King Charles’s coronation. The rituals that we have been witnessing are designed to avoid the potential disruption that all such rites of passage make possible (hence the repetition of words such as tradition and history).
