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Watching the Funeral
I'm not a Monarchist, but the Funeral still got to me.
I ended up watching most of it (and would have seen even more if I hadn't had visitors for part of the morning). I may even watch it again - it's a form of 'slow TV'. It's both oddly relaxing and deeply involving. The silent crowds along the streets are as much a part of the event as the people in the long procession.
I think the Monarchy (when it works well, as it did under Elizabeth II) is one of the things that gives us a strong sense of identity as a nation. When we lost her, we lost a small part of ourselves.
It isn't so much that monarchy is a wonderful thing - when it goes wrong, it can go terribly wrong - but when it works, it can give a sense of history and continuity that binds us together.
I guess we can thank Prince Albert for that. Under VIctoria and Albert, the monarchy started that shift from "What the people can do for me" to "What can the monarch do for the people". (I'm going to ignore the massive personal wealth of the monarch here, but a fair bit of the crown income does go to the state)
Elizabeth II had a deep sense of duty and represented Britain all over the world. Her long time on the throne meant that she had enormous personal knowledge of people and politics.
That deep sense of duty earned her respect from many people, and it meant that we could invest part of our sense of national identity in the Monarchy. I trust King Charles III to carry on that duty (Wouldn't trust some other members of the Royal Family, but fortunately they aren't the ones inheriting the throne)
The pageantry and spectacle that surrounds major royal events allows us to become part of these events, but there is no compulsion. You can celebrate Royal weddings and funerals, or you can ignore them totally. Some, I choose to ignore, but the Funeral felt different. Elizabeth II came to the throne before I was born, and I'm in my 60s now. I suspect that my middle name of Elizabeth was probably at least chosen in part in acknowledgement of the Queen.
I felt part of the watching crowds. It felt right that no one was waving flags - that will come with the Coronation. It's not about nationalism, it's about being a Nation. (I'm not sure if that will make any sense to a non-Brit.)
I'm still not really a Monarchist, but I came closer to being one - and yes, I will celebrate the Coronation when it comes.
Because King Charles will represent us as a people, and I believe he will do this well, and with a deep sense of duty, as his mother did.
And because will all the problems that we face (energy prices, food prices, Liz Truss as Prime Minster, etc), I look around the World and know that I'm damn lucky to live where I do.
We don't have perfection - but no country does. But we have a heck of a lot more than many others do.
I look at Ukraine (because I have a lot of conversations with Ukrainians these days) and their history is so different to ours. Because they have had relatively few periods of independence as a country, one of he first things the Russians do when they take over a region is to try and obliterate the history and replace school curriculums with a Russian focused history.. Ukraine doesn't really have an equivalent of our Monarchy. They've had problems with many of their presidents in recent times. There are few figures who can serve as a focus. Shaking off the legacy of Russian-style politics is hard.
Tavas Shevchenko was a Ukrainian poet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko - and this quote from a town recently liberated by the Ukrainian army I find rather telling.
Andrii Konashavych, pointed to the chair where the pseudo-mayor had sat in the council building. On the wall was a portrait of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet who gives his name to the town. What happened to the Putin photo? “We tore it up,” Konashavych said. Why was there no picture of President Zelenskiy? “Presidents come and go. Shevchenko is eternal,” he replied.
I guess that's what the Monarch is to us. Prime Minsters come and go, but barring a few minor hiccups, the Monarchy has been with us since 1066.
So, if you haven't already watched the funeral, sit down for a while with a cup of tea and imagine living in a country that is far from perfect, but at least has no ongoing war, has more stability than most of the world, and has a head of state that most of us actually trust (even when we aren't monarchists).
Goodbye Elizabeth. You did your job, and you did it well.
God Save the King. (Who is going to be over-worked and probably stressed to the eyeballs for the rest of his life)
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So I too am not much of a Monarchist, but as you point out that job can be done well, or not so well. As for wealth, those with wealth and ability will certainly make money. In some ways the fact that King Charles amassed a large fortune is a good thing for the country, at least he knows how money works and/or knows who to turn to for good advice (and has shown a willingness to take that advice).
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Oh, I like that. Yes. I might steal it, that sums it up perfectly.
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The having to mourn so publicly is a really difficult aspect of monarchy.
H
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Probably not the first time of writing (I imagine there was paperwork involved in the accession council business), but it must still have been a conscious and unfamiliar act, and a painfully significant one in that context.
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Monarchy doesn't make sense, but it *works*; I think one of the more insightful things I read amongst a great deal of tabloid effusion was that the Queen represented a physical incarnation or avatar of the nation as a whole, someone whose function is *being* us in the body of a single human entity.
And if you're going to do that, it actually makes quite a lot of sense to pick someone effectively at random -- not out of talent, or beauty, and least of all out of lust for power, but simply by accident of birth -- and then train them up from childhood to the role.
My own feeling was always that she was *my* Queen, my personal possession there for my benefit, in a way that no political leader has ever been. She existed for us; they existed for their own ends. The pageantry of the great rituals of state takes place for our benefit, like the rituals of the changing year -- Christmas, Easter, summers by the seaside -- so that we can celebrate them as landmarks in the Proper Way that Things Should Be Done, because they always have been done in that way, changeless and enduring in their regularity.
I didn't mourn the Queen as a person; there was no tragedy in living long and dying quickly and peacefully at a quiet moment in a place that she loved. I was shocked to learn of her death, and by the almost casual manner in which I heard of it from abroad (such things should be discovered via the BBC...), but I never felt any inclination to weep, or to grieve.
It is change, that is all; change inevitable and yet unexpected. (I long held the private suspicion that Charles, who is clearly a chronic worrier and has the disadvantage of being male, would predecease his serene and long-lived mother -- well, he has successfully survived!)
Having made it this far, I think he will be a good King; a king who has learned wisdom and patience the hard way, who has endured mockery (not least for his environmentalism, in which he was *decades* ahead of most of the rest of the country) and come out respected, and who, as it happens, has spent most of his life trying to alleviate the issues that are currently and likely to be increasingly of concern to us as a nation; poverty, youth disaffection, and climate change. An oddly appropriate king for our era, and one whom yes, I would trust; trust to do his duty as he saw it, painstakingly and perhaps without flair, but with dogged determination and without thought of his own benefit. A king who, when left to his own desires, has his favourite clothes repaired until they fall to pieces and falls faithfully in love with an older woman rather than a young and glamorous one.
I suspect he won't enjoy being monarch very much. I imagine that he will do it to the best of his ability, as his mother did and as I trust his heir will gain the wisdom to do after him. The Queen is dead. Long live the King -- he won't, in the nature of things, but if he does as well as Edward VII, who bloomed late into his role against expectations, then he will be remembered with appreciation. (Let's hope that we don't end up with the disasters that likewise followed upon the Edwardian era...)
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I've seen a lot of nasty comments about how his inherited wealth will comfort Charles. The thing with Charles is that a lot of billionaires have acquired that wealth through having a strong streak of sociopathy, but for him it is just there; something he dutifully manages for posterity as previous generations managed it for him, rather than using it as a marker in a status game or for indulging a lust for power. It's another part of the "pick someone at random", and we won't always get as lucky as we did with either Elizabeth or Charles, but I think it's still a better chance than many systems. Even a politician with a genuine desire to serve (and I think most of them do) needs to think on a much shorter time scale to have any chance of getting to a level of power where they can do something. A properly functioning constitutional monarchy gives us a good mix of the short and the long view.
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And that affects so much.
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The Queen wasn't ever going to be short of a penny -- she could afford to run racehorses as a hobby, for example -- but I don't think 'the richest woman in Britain' was in the gratuitous-consumption league of footballers, film stars, and tinpot dictators flashing their gold-plated bath taps. And as you say, that wealth is very much a trust to be managed for posterity and passed on as an estate in good heart, rather than a windfall to be splurged and tied up in trust-funds to prevent the next generation from spending themselves silly...
I agree that most people originally go into politics with a desire to make a useful change, although there are definitely some who give the impression of regarding it as just a career like any other. (We had the dubious pleasure of a ambitious and subsequently-national-level politician as a local school governor in the days when she was just a pushy ward councillor, and she always gave the impression of having absolutely zero interest in the school save on the rare occasions where association with it might be good for her future prospects. She rose rapidly in the party ranks.)
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I can remember there being a bit of a to-do about Edward VIII presenting Wallis Simpson with some jewels that he had somewhat dubious ownership of, because there was an argument that they were property of the Crown and not Edward Windsor, or at best entailed to him even if personal property.
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Wasn't there some newspaper story about the (new) Princess of Wales wearing earrings to the funeral that had been bestowed on then-Princess Elizabeth by some foreign monarch at the time of her marriage? I'm not sure if that sort of thing counts as private jewellery or Crown Jewels, as it wasn't exactly a personal gift in the first place -- but presumably passing them on to the wife of the heir to the throne is a different matter from giving them to your bonne-amie...
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