It is a bit of a myth to say that she was loved. She became an icon to whom it was customary to apply that term, but the affection was a ritual. She was known, without rancor, for her little foibles: her amazing extravagance, her reactionary attitudes, her fondness for a tipple. In any other member of the royal family, these traits would have been critically deconstructed. But the Queen Mum was sanctified as a national treasure. She grew so old that the preparations for her death became indecently explicit: the BBC’s fabled rehearsals for the great moment, the black ties in every news anchor’s desk drawer, the obituary sound bites that politicians kept on the databases. In that sense, too, she transcended common humanity.
For the older generation of Brits, she was a reassuring figure. They, like her, could remember the days when royalty retained an unchallenged place in British life. They remembered the circumstances in which the job of queen was thrust upon her, when her brother-in-law, Edward VIII, abdicated to his own self-indulgence. They witnessed her performance during World War II, when she bravely offered comfort to the victims of Hitler’s bombs. This was still the period when such gestures took on an otherworldly quality, with the monarch and his consort descending from on high to move among their people. Because the Queen Mother never did change, staying faithful to her hats and pastel dresses, her horse-racing friends and her sweet-faced rejection of the slightest intrusion into her privacy, she still had millions of mostly elderly admirers when she died. As the last such royal, she now leaves the monarchy exposed. As long as she lived, there was at least one firewall against an all-out critique. Somehow it seemed indecent to attack too fiercely an institution of which this unnaturally durable relic of the Edwardian age remained the oldest representative.
All is not lost. Her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, has retained much of her mother’s untouchable dignity. She is dutiful to a fault, an impeccable performer of her public role, and beyond the criticism that so many of her own offspring attract. But even she has become a defensive figure, known to be worried about her public image, desperately in thrall to courtiers doubling as image consultants, a trade her mother would barely have been aware of. Her son and heir, Prince Charles, publicly agonizes over just about every aspect of his life with a candor that owes much to Sigmund Freud, rather less to the dignity that has hitherto marked his rank. And the rest of the royals–princes and princesses, divorces and other troubled hangers-on–continue to attract ever-increasing contempt from a public more voracious for royal scandal than for the respectful silence that enshrouded most of the Queen Mother’s life.
She leaves a country that talks more than it has ever done about the advantages of exchanging the monarchy for a republic. This, in my opinion, will not happen for decades, or even perhaps in this century. It is a waste of political time even to discuss it. Though the British have lost their respect, they have not ceased to be among the most conservative people on earth. A referendum on the monarchy would produce, in an age when elected politicians are more unpopular than ever, a strong endorsement. Where would our tourist industry be, without the changing of the monarch’s guard? What would the papers have to write about, if princesses had been sent to the virtual guillotine? Would we prefer to elect some inoffensive nonentity as president, instead of taking our chances with nonentities of the blood royal? These are the arguments that would win the day.
The Queen Mother, in her way, was not a nonentity. She retained a certain aura by declining to observe the rules of the modern age. She became, by her very longevity, an extraordinary person, further out of reach of real life than she had been when she was pitched into queendom. We came to look at her as a kind of freak, not just for her years but for her connection to a world that has totally disappeared. Now that she has gone, the monarchy faces, rather bleakly, a world it can never again be sure of.
