On my desk I have a scuffed silver coin that I had to rummage through a box to find. It was given to me in 1977 — there was one for every child in my British primary school — to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. I was 7 and she had already been on the throne for 25 years.
My memories of the Jubilee are unsurprisingly fragmented, a few images of bunting and cake and plastic Union Jack hats. Later I received another coin, commemorating the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and every few years throughout my life there has been another anniversary, or a wedding, or latterly a tabloid scandal to remind me of the monarchy’s role in what, on occasions such as these, commentators refer to as “the life of the nation.”
Queen Elizabeth’s death at the age of 96 ends the longest reign in British history, and comes at a time when the life of the nation — and its future — feels uncertain. The queen’s last public appearance was greeting the fourth prime minister in seven years. Brexit has destabilized the nation’s relationships with its closest neighbors. Covid has left deep scars, inflation is at a 40-year high and, as winter looms, an energy crisis looks set to impoverish many British households.
In 1978 the acerbically conservative poet Philip Larkin was asked to write a verse commemorating the Jubilee. He responded with a quatrain:
In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange there was one constant good: she did not change.
For every Briton who believes that the bedrock of the
nation is the monarchy and the hierarchy it authorizes,
there’s another who will remind you that the billionaire Windsors
changed their name from the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha only
during the awkwardness of the First World War
It’s interesting to me that even then, the queen’s psychological value to the country she ruled lay in continuity. Since the inauguration, in 1952, of what postwar optimists termed the “new Elizabethan age,” enormous social changes had taken place.
Like the 2020s, the 1970s were times of economic hardship, social unrest and a sense of national diminishment. Many felt, like Larkin, that the country was worsening and “growing strange,” dog-whistle language for the presence of immigrants from the former colonies and their second-generation children. There we were, standing in morning assembly, fingering our silver coins and singing the national anthem along with the others.
Then, as now, many Britons mourn the nation’s lost imperial grandeur, and for them the pageantry of monarchy and Elizabeth’s presence as its leading player have been a balm for the ache of a changing world.
The British elite have always understood that the monarchy is a screen onto which the people project their own fantasies, and Elizabeth’s greatest asset as queen was her blankness.
She liked dogs and horses, and rarely betrayed strong emotions. She seemed to accept that her role was to be shown things, so very many things: factories and ships and tanks and local customs and types of cheese and the right way to tie the traditional garment, to receive bouquets of flowers from small curtsying girls, and in return never to appear bored or irritated by what was surely often a boring public role.
The queen bridged the colonial and post-colonial eras. But for those of us who have a complicated relationship to Britain’s imperial past, the continuity represented by Elizabeth was not an unmitigated good. My father’s side of our family was made up of staunch Indian nationalists who worked for the end of imperial rule in 1947.
Like many other people around the world whose families fought the British Empire, I reject its mythology of benevolence and enlightenment, and find the royal demand for deference repugnant.
Elizabeth was queen when British officers tortured Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising. She was queen when troops fired on civilians in Northern Ireland. She spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction. Throughout that lifetime, the British media enthusiastically reported on royal tours of the newly independent countries of the Commonwealth, dwelling on exotic dances for the white queen and cargo cults devoted to her consort.
My hope is that as the screen of Elizabeth falls away, Britons may find it easier to recognize the unhealthiness of a dependency on imperial nostalgia for self-esteem. Despite his pledge to continue his mother’s legacy, the new King Charles III will struggle to be such a blank screen for the projections of his people.
Unlike his mother, he is known to be a man of opinions. His “black spider” memos, handwritten letters and notes given to government ministers on topics from agriculture to architecture, have led to concerns that, as a ruler, he will be tempted to overstep the strict constitutional bounds of the monarchy and dabble in politics.
He ascends the throne in an age of unprecedented media scrutiny, and his private life has been fodder for decades of public gossip. And he, unlike his mother, does not represent unbroken continuity with Empire.
Of course there has always been an anti-royalist tradition in Britain. For every Briton who believes that the bedrock of the nation is the monarchy and the hierarchy it authorizes, there’s another who will remind you that the billionaire Windsors changed their name from the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha only during the awkwardness of the First World War.
As I turn over the coin on my desk, I hope that with the death of Elizabeth II, who performed the ceremonies of the past so well, her subjects will start to dream of the future once again.