As Queen Elizabeth II is mourned, the paradoxes have streamed together with the accolades.
Praise is given to the late queen’s emotional restraint in public. Yet, the most fitting tribute is deemed an outpouring of grief and emotion.
Elizabeth is praised for her homeliness. Yet, her Tupperware and £20 two-bar electric heater are only remarkable because she was queen. We wouldn’t keep hearing about them otherwise.
She is remembered fondly for her human touch. Yet, her humanity comes across so vividly only if her majesty is deemed to levitate above it.
Theresa May regaled the Commons with a story about a picnic she enjoyed, while prime minister, with the queen at Balmoral. May was carrying a plate of cheese to the table when the cheese fell on the floor. May quickly put the cheese back on the plate and set it on the table, only to realise the queen had been watching her every move: “I looked at her. She looked at me – and she just smiled!”
Which ordinary nonagenarian’s smile can give instant relief to a prime minister? What person causes Privy Counsellors to feel mortified in her presence because of a ringing mobile phone or a minor breach of protocol? What kind of ordinary person can make tough politicians feel eternally grateful for saving them from embarrassment?
The Commons was in stitches in hearing these stories, the loud laughter reliving the relief.
The queen is spoken of as though her life was magnetised by a reality more rarefied than ours. Yet, this reality is evoked by incidents where she entered popular fictions: her tea with Paddington Bear and her helicopter flight with James Bond.
Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, praised her as an unchanging rock on which modern Britain was built. Yet, she did change or else changing modern Britain might well have rejected her.
Linguists have pointed to her gradual evolution of accent, ascertainable by following YouTube videos of her addresses over the decades.
As recently as 30 years ago, 40 years into her reign, it would have been impossible to imagine her participating in that tea with Paddington Bear. It ends with the monarch tapping her silver spoon, against the tea-cup, to the tune of (the rock band) Queen’s most famous drum intro, We Will Rock You.
In 2018, she gave a crowd-pleasing eye-roll when Prince Charles called her “mummy” at her 92nd birthday celebrations. That wouldn’t have happened 20 years earlier, in 1998, less than a year after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when her lack of emotional expressiveness provoked an extraordinary wave of populist anger.
Indeed, we might say a further paradox in the current mourning is how memory of the queen depends on forgetfulness. The self-control she’s praised for now was in the dock in 1997.
Royal protocol, now credited with being a steady beacon in times of change, demands that the flag only flies at Buckingham Palace when the monarch is in residence. When Diana died, the queen was at Balmoral. There was public outrage that “mere protocol” should prevent a flag being flown at half-mast at the royal palace in London.
That was an episode when many observers doubted whether the monarchy could survive the queen. It was the moment when the ethos of royalty – ritualised self-control – seemed in flat contradiction to ritualised expression of feeling, the ethos of popular democracy.
In democracies, it’s politicians, not symbolic monarchs, who lend their names to our times and isms- Ranier Fsadni
We see the effects of that episode in the commentary today. She is hailed as Elizabeth the Great but, by common agreement, her greatest achievement has been ensuring that the monarchy has survived.
Whether it’s on borrowed time is unclear. For all the late queen’s gifts and unswerving sense of duty, she left the institution of monarchy far more brittle and fragile than she found it.
Her age has grandly been called the new Elizabethan age. Churchill, her first prime minister, coined the term. It was out of protectiveness for the young queen, to give her something of the mantle of her great predecessor, Elizabeth I.
However, when Shekhar Kapoor directed Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Blanchett’s portrayal turned out to owe far more to Margaret Thatcher. Blanchett’s Elizabeth evolves, like Thatcher in real life, into a harder woman, with a deeper voice, a mask-like face and greater distance from those around her.
It’s the opposite journey of Elizabeth II who visibly softened and let down her public persona’s mask more often.
We should not be surprised. Blanchett was portraying a lone woman of real power in a world of ruthless men. The Age of Thatcher, with its confrontations and battles, is the proper name of public life in 1980s Britain, just as the Age of Blair covers the liberal hubris of the late 1990s and early 2000s and, perhaps, the Age of Johnson will come to describe the last six years.
In democracies, it’s politicians, not symbolic monarchs, who lend their names to our times and isms.
Elizabeth II is remembered differently. Unlike her distant predecessors, she did not raise or cut taxes. She did not institute public works, hang enemies or wage war. The new Elizabethan Age did not shape history; it punctuated the milestones of private times.
For some, her coronation coincided with the first time they watched television. For others, the unexpected encounter with royalty brightened up a period in hospital or a holiday in Scotland. The memory of the wedding of Charles and Diana lives on with the memory of cheering in the park, in the bloom of first love, or in the names given to children born shortly after. The Diamond Jubilee is remembered alongside the London Olympic Games.
Elizabeth II was a woman of authority without real power. A regal figure in a plebeian age. A symbol of splendour in straitened times. A model of aristocratic public service in an age of kleptocrats and kakistocrats. The paradoxes that surround her praises are not of her making.
The paradoxes are ours: circles squared by public discourse as it praises monarchy in terms acceptable to democracy.