Diamond Life: The Death of the Queen
and the End of an Era
Britain was shocked and plunged into mourning this week with the news of the death of the only monarch most of them have ever known, as Queen Elizabeth II ended a seventy-year reign on the British throne. She was 96. To be fair, it was big news around the world too, but more a dark footnote before the news networks got on with the more important news. After all, the position of the monarch of Britain has been, for about a hundred years now, largely symbolic and almost completely devoid of any power, a figurehead who rubberstamps the decisions made by his or her government, with little real choice in the matter and hardly any involvement in the running of their country. As a constitutional monarch, Elizabeth was beholden to, even controlled by her Parliament, and the real power in Britain lies, as it has done for a long time now, with the Prime Minister.
So it wasn’t like when a president or a serving prime minister dies; sure, it’s bad news and everyone is sorry, but life will go on and there is no threat whatever to the running of the country. There will be no battle for the crown, no pretenders or claimants fighting it out, no power vacuum and no policy changes. To be crude about it, all that has happened in real, political terms is that there is a new arse on the throne - a male one, for the first time in seven decades - and Britain has its third king named Charles. There’ll be a state funeral of course, with all the pomp and ceremony you would expect, but when it’s over Britain’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, will head to Buckingham Palace (if she hasn’t done so already) to meet the new king and talk about this and that, then **** off back to Downing Street to do whatever she wants to do. Apart from getting certain things signed into law, the new king will not figure in the decision-making process as his country faces life under a new monarch and a new Prime Minister, and tries to come to terms with things like the aftermath of Brexit, Covid and the continuing worry of the war in Ukraine. I don’t say none of that will bother Charles - I’m sure it will weigh heavily on his mind - but there won’t be a thing he can do about it.
Speaking as an Irishman, I can’t say I’m sorry Elizabeth is dead. No Irish person really is. She was the symbol of a country that kept us down and occupied us for seven hundred years, who treated us at times like slaves or even animals, and who tried to force their own religion upon us. She was the queen who presided over the illegal internment without trial of IRA prisoners, who watched impassively as Catholics were driven out of Ulster in the 1970s, who remained silent as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were jailed, erroneously and without a shred of actual real evidence, for bombings they had nothing to do with, and who failed to utter a word of apology to these men on their long-delayed release.
So you can see why no Irish tears will be shed at the news of her death. It might not in fact be going too far to say that more than one glass might be raised to her in pubs across Ireland, and not to her health. Old enmities die hard, and while our own government has tried to brush the last seven centuries under the carpet and attempt to move forward - which is fair enough, so far as it goes: simmering resentment and hatred in the end get you nowhere, and hold back progress - to paraphrase something said in Game of Thrones, Ireland remembers.
But it’s not just us that have good reason to hate her. Her own subjects have hardly been treated well under her reign either. She allowed her country to involve itself in two wars, one in the Falkland Islands and one in Iraq, and made no comment. She was the one who should have spoken up, perhaps, when the full horror of the evil life of Jimmy Savile and the extent of the co-operation and cover-up involved by the institutions of the British media and government came to light, and yet she said nothing. She watched Britain disintegrate under the hardline policies of Margaret Thatcher, and preferred to remain aloof behind the walls of Buckingham Palace. She all but snubbed the death of Princess Diana, turning many of her supporters against her, and the only time she really emerged from behind the walls of the palace was to visit someone or welcome someone to her fortress home, one of her last real involvements with the public being when she whined about Windsor Castle nearly burning down. An edifice, I should point out, that is paid for with British taxpayers’ money, and which she would not have to put her hand into the royal pocket to rebuild.
But all of that aside - and it’s only so that nobody can call me a hypocrite by writing this - there’s no denying that the loss of their queen is a big deal for the British. As I say, most people will only remember her on the throne. They’ve only ever had one queen, and yes, she’s ruled the longest of any monarch in history, including her predecessor who bears her name, and Victoria. But then, what has she had to do to keep her crown? Nothing. What attempts have been made to depose her? None. How many wars has she fought, prosecuted, or prevented? Same answer: none. So what did her “Platinum Jubilee” represent? Seventy years of not dying, basically. Not a great achievement, in my book.
However, as I say, let’s push all that to one side. British people are hurting right now, mourning the loss of their queen, and we should recognise that. And it would be churlish and indeed disingenuous of me, in a journal which catalogues the history of England, not to mark the event. So we need to depart from the timeline, leaving the imminent arrival of William the Conqueror on English shores, and move almost a thousand years into the future, our present, to look back at the life of what is likely to be, for the foreseeable future anyway, Britain’s last queen.
April 21 1926 was the date when the baby Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born into the world, the first daughter of King George VI, though at this time he was only Duke of York, and would not succeed to the throne for another ten years. Somewhat like her sixteenth-century Tudor predecessor, Elizabeth was not expected to reign. There were two in line before her, her own father George and his brother, her uncle, Edward. The latter ascended to the throne first, but a constitutional crisis involving him and a divorced woman became a famous scandal, and led to the first-ever abdication of a British monarch. George then became king.
George VI would then be king at a time when England, and Britain, faced its darkest days, as Winston Churchill and the Royal Air Force held out against the massed hordes of the German Luftwaffe, prelude to a Nazi invasion of the island, the final bastion of freedom remaining in Europe at the time. It’s fair to say George played no real part in that eventual victory, though it would also be fair to say he did give the British people heart through his famous speeches on the radio.
In a similar fashion perhaps to her illustrious ancestor, Victoria, Elizabeth fell in love with a foreigner, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, and the relationship was frowned upon. Philip had no financial standing of his own, and links through his sisters to the Nazi party. Despite all this, the two were in love and the marriage took place in 1947, just after the war had ended. Almost exactly a year later the couple had their first child, Charles, who was styled Prince Charles and has just become King Charles III. Two years after his birth he had a sister, Princess Margaret.
From 1951 onwards King George’s health was in decline and his daughter often stood in for him in official capacities. When he died in 1953, Elizabeth came to the throne as Queen Elizabeth II on June 2. She began her reign, as her father had ended his, and most of the monarchs before him too, with very little power, but a lot to do. She was the symbol of Britain, and as the new queen it was important she be seen, so she spent most of her time on tour, as it were, becoming the first reigning monarch to visit her territories of Australia and New Zealand, where people went wild, turning out in droves to see her. She ended up being the British monarch who visited the most countries and states in history, but then, with no power to hold onto back home and no threat to her crown, what else was there to do? At the beginning of her reign Elizabeth did retain the power to choose a successor as Prime Minister, and when Anthony Eden resigned over the Suez crisis in 1957 she chose Harold McMillan, though it should be understood this was not a unilateral decision, but made in concert with the Cabinet and the Conservative Party Council. These days, they just decided among themselves and then went to the palace to get her royal seal, but the deal was done long before they walked through the royal gates.
In 1960 Elizabeth gave birth to her third child, Andrew, and four years later Edward joined the family. It’s true to say that Elizabeth presided over the disintegration of the British Empire, though she had no control over events. People who had sworn - or been made or compelled to swear - allegiance to the British crown now wanted their independence, and African and Caribbean countries began to sue for self-governance, so that by about 1978 there was little left of what was now termed “the British Commonwealth”. Despite celebrating her silver jubilee in 1977, things were not rosey in the garden. A communist spy was discovered to have been operating almost literally under the royal nose, as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Anthony Blunt was tried for treason but for some reason which I’m not going to research now was granted immunity from prosecution. Elizabeth did however strip him of his knighthood. That same year she had to deal with the death of Lord Henry Mountbatten, killed when a bomb planted by the IRA on his boat exploded.
In 1981 she was herself the victim of an attempted assassination, though apparently the bullets used were blanks (why would you bother? Honestly?) and again when she visited New Zealand later that year. This time the bullets were real, but the marksmanship was not. The would-be assassin missed, and after being sentenced to three years in an asylum escaped and tried to do for the future King of Britain too when he planned to shoot down Prince Charles. Evidence of the lack of influence the Queen had over other heads of state, and indeed quite likely the lack of power Britain had to resist the USA, came in 1983 when then-President Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her commonwealth possessions, without informing her. Okay, the Canadian Prime Minister of the time claimed she was a “behind the scenes force” in ending the apartheid regime in South Africa. I don’t know how much of that is true and how much is spin, but if more true than not, then I guess you have to give that one to her. How exactly she achieved such an object is a matter of speculation though.
During the 1980s the amount of esteem the public, or at least the tabloid newspapers, held the royal family in became apparent, as every other day brought headlines of scandal within the palace - real or made up, it really didn’t seem to matter; Britons will believe what they read in The Sun or The Star or The Mirror as easily and with as little investigation or challenge as Americans will believe Fox News -and the whole thing became a sort of living soap opera. Not that every story was made up, or that the royal family did not give fuel for the fire, with Princess Anne divorcing her husband, Prince Andrew separating from his wife, and finally Prince Charles kicking Diana to the kerb. The institution that had once been viewed with awe, respect and fear and later at least reverence and regard became one of ridicule and gossip. Like the part of Windsor Castle destroyed by fire in 1992, leading her to describe the year as her anus horribilis- wait, what? Oh sorry: that should read annus horribilis - horrible year, the reputation of and regard for the monarchy was beginning to burn down. People began to question why they were being taxed to pay the enormous salaries of these people who basically did nothing and lived off their backs? An underswell of republican sentiment began to rumble through this green and pleasant land, and while they weren’t exactly rolling guillotines out into Leicester Square, people were far from happy with their rulers.
In her travels, Elizabeth scored many firsts. She was the first reigning British monarch to visit China, the first to go to Russia, but when she made a trip to India old enmities boiled over into protest, particularly at the site of the Amritsar Massacre, where hundreds or possibly thousands of peaceful protesters were slaughtered by the British Indian Army in 1919. In 1997, the same year she visited India, Princess Diana, now divorced from her son, was killed in a high-speed car chase. Despite having a state funeral, the silence of the Queen after the funeral and the refusal to fly a flag at half-mast over the palace gained her public condemnation. It was perceived that she was treating her late, divorced daughter-in-law coldly and that she no longer really wished her to be associated with the royal family. Whatever the truth - or not - of that, the Queen’s reputation suffered because of it, and she was forced to make a public address to state her position and appear more warm and maternal towards the late princess. In some ways, people never forgave her for this. They may have loved their Queen, but they loved Diana much more, and to see her, or perceive her being snubbed in such a way cut to the heart of British outrage. To a large degree, the Queen’s reputation never recovered from this.
In 2011, to much protest, none of which was listened to by our government, Elizabeth made the first state visit of a British monarch to Ireland. Well, the first of one who didn’t want to crush, convert, invade or kill us, or all four. Prince Philip died in 2021, and unlike her government (and ours) Elizabeth strictly observed Covid-19 protocols, attending his funeral alone. You have to give her credit for that. Elizabeth celebrated her Platinum Jubilee in February of this year, marking seventy years on the throne, the longest of any reigning British monarch. Britain had only just got over all the pomp, excitement and pageantry when they were suddenly dealing with her passing, as the Queen became ill on September 8 and died hours later. No cause was given, though Her Majesty had been in poor health for some time, cancelling engagements and curtailing her traditional state visits. She had also contracted Covid, though this was not said to have played any part in her illness. Then again, she was ninety-six, so her age would not have helped towards any sort of full recovery.
On the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, her son and heir, Charles, formerly Prince Charles, has become King Charles III and is officially crowned since today as the new King of Britain. For the first time in seventy years, Britain has a male monarch on the throne. Charles accedes to the throne at age of seventy-three, but he has his own heir in his son William, Duke of Cambridge and now Duke of Cornwall (I don’t know if one title supersedes the other, or if he holds both). To the best of my knowledge (and it’s not great on the recent British monarchy) I think Charles’ consort, Camilla Parker Bowles, now officially Queen Camilla, is the first “commoner” to sit beside a King of Britain, as in, she has no title, or had none before marrying Charles. What the British people think of that, I can only guess at.
The official state funeral for Queen Elizabeth II takes place on Monday, September 19 at Westminster Abbey. Until then, ten days of mourning have been proclaimed throughout Britain, but what that means officially I have no clue, as businesses, public services, sports fixtures and public venues have been told they are under no obligation to close, nor are banks, or anywhere, really, other than royal residences.
It just remains, then, for me to offer my condolences to the people of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, and to place the full stop at what is certainly, for most people, the end of an era.