Kings and heads of state say goodbye to Elizabeth II in London on Monday. A historic and superlative funeral. First state funeral since Winston Churchill, on January 30, 1965. The first to be celebrated by an English monarch in Westminster Abbey since the 18th century. Before a planetary audience estimated at 4 billion people, four times that of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Games in which the Queen made a cameo alongside James Bond. Attended by the gotha of royalty and all the world’s leaders except the pariahs of the earth: Putin, Maduro, El Assad, and half a dozen of the like.
London says goodbye to a queen and the world to an era. These super funerals have meant several things: An exaltation of the monarchy that has shown all the pomp and the best Rolls Royce of the royal garage. A large UK marketing operation whose decline has accentuated the Brexit. An exhibition of the always brilliant London that in the Elizabethan years went from the black and white hardships of the post world war to the cosmopolitanism of the City and the Premier, passing through the Beatles, the miniskirt of Mary Quant, and the Cool Britannia. All this is true, but superficial.
Because “Elizabeth II seemed to embody in her personal longevity the continuity of British history, of the four nations of the United Kingdom and, beyond, of the commonwealth. For us and for much of the world, the quintessence of Britain, the personification of an idealized common identity,” he wrote. historian Simon Schama in Financial Timesformerly “organ of the City” and today owned by a Japanese company and world standard of the liberal order.
[Este es el motivo por el que el ataúd de Isabel II está forrado con plomo]
What identity is Schama talking about? Sebastian Milibank, editor of ‘the critic’ provides this answer; “In a world that rejects social hierarchies, deference, aristocracy, tradition and religion (…) the Queen embodied a way of life and a set of values today alien to the British: a sense of duty, humility and religious piety…as the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant across the desert, Elizabeth II has carried the hidden heart of British life through this secular and disenchanted age.”
Elizabeth II knew how to embody what in 1867 Walter Bagehot defined in “The English Constitution” as the values of the monarchy: “to be intelligible to the common people, to lead the august ceremonial and embody the family ideal”. “Her reign over him has served as a consolation, though much less compensation, for all that was evaporating from Britain: colonies, marriages, and industries,” Schama writes.
“The consolation that she lavished was the fruit of a comforting stability, of a precious continuity in a time of rapid social, technological and economic change” agrees Antony Beevor who cites “one of the rare jokes of Karl Marx which presented England as the only country where the working class had the same bourgeois leanings as the monarchy.
The great historian of Second World War He maintains that “Queen Elizabeth II never pretended to be what she was not”. She states that she “loved horses but she had no intellectual pretense”. Beevor says that she greeted him with this remark: “You know, I haven’t read any of her books.” He believes that he is not the only author so welcomed because the deceased only read Dick Francis’s police novels always set “in the universe of horse racing.”
Beevor was an officer in the British Army, whose decline in numbers is countable: it had 872,000 people when Elizabeth II acceded to the throne in 1952; today it has 150,000. Of course, the brightness of the red jackets and otter hats, as well as all those uniforms that looked Charles III to the last soldier passing for the heir they have given luster to the ceremonial.
Queen Elizabeth II at her Platinum Jubilee.
[Éramos monárquicos y no lo sabíamos]
The SNP has never been a Republican party. For historical reasons, the Kings of Scotland became the Kings of England. And for pragmatic reasons: their monarchism allows them to affirm that they are not separatists, their model is Australia, Canada and the other twelve Commonwealth member states that retain the British monarch as head of state.
Elizabeth II and her roots in Scotland, in whose residence of Balmoral he spent all the summers of his life and where he died, they are beyond doubt. Flour from another costal is Carlos III who he chose as his residence Restormel Manor, in the warmer southern tip of England. Elizabeth II preferred the rugged and intemperate solitude of Balmoral, through whose domains she drove her Range Rover carrying on board more than one Arab prince from countries where women were not allowed to drive.
Real niceties. Like that phrase, dropped after mass, days before the 2014 referendum: “I hope people think very carefully about the future.” For all that, Republican sentiment is higher in Scotland (between 36% and 47%, according to three polls published this year) than in the UK as a whole, 27% according to the May 2022 YouGov poll, that is, before the waves of fervor unleashed by the platinum jubilee of May and, surely, by the death of the Queen.
Elizabeth II’s popularity was beyond doubt, 75% favorable opinion in YouGov quoted poll. But they are not hereditary: the then Prince of Wales only collected 42% of positive opinions. Nor are they guaranteed. If among those over 65 years old they touch 80% among the youngest (18-24 years old) they fall to 30%.
Incidentally only in Scotland, the coffin was transported in a vehicle not manufactured in the United Kingdom, a brand new Mercedes. In London a Jaguar took over in a procession of Rolls and Bentleys. Curious way to show their national zeal… if it weren’t for the fact that Rolls Royce belongs to BMW, Bentley to Volkswagen and Jaguar to the Indian Tata.
[Camilla habla de Isabel II: “Fue una mujer solitaria en un mundo dominado por hombres”]
From the automobile industry to diplomacy, Elizabeth II knew how to embody the transformation of an imperial nation in a middle power with the corollary of the Commonwealth. He could not and did not know how to solve the European anchoring of the United Kingdom, although the main culprit is the Conservative Party, dragged into the populist mud by its leaders. From those European years, in addition to the funeral Mercedes, the decimal metric system and the Channel Tunnel survive, an engineering prodigy that unites England with the Old Continent.
When, this afternoon, the remains of Isabel II rest in Windsor, the horses have returned to their stables, the soldiers to their barracks and the heads of state and kings to their countries of origin, an era will have ended. The time has come for Charles III, who in the first week of his reign has publicly shown more signs of impatience, related to his fountain pen, than his mother has in decades.
Fortunately for him, according to the director of the think tank Chatham House, Bronwen Maddox“no monarch can, alone, make or destroy the fortune and reputation of a country”.
PS: ‘The Sun’ told what the Queen carried in her inseparable bag: lipstick, reading glasses, a pocketknife, a fountain pen, a notebook, a camera, a small mirror and a pack of mints. The rest is myth.
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