Reposted: The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Coronation was a great spectacle, but it was hard to say what it meant, exactly.
These are difficult times. On reflection, Queen Elizabeth’s funeral said more about the sources of the fortitude that’s needed right now.
The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II will take place on Monday 19th September 2022.
The casket of the Queen lies in state in Westminster Hall in Whitehall. Hundreds of thousands of people are queuing for hours, to pay their respects, and to say goodbye. At noon on the day before the funeral the queue was five miles long, down Whitehall, across the river at Waterloo and down to the King's Steps Garden in Bermondsey. People are advised not to join the queue, because they are not likely to reach the casket before it is removed for the funeral.
It is a turning of the page. Queen Elizabeth will be laid to rest. Charles is King.
It is not enough to understand the Queen's death as a family story and a handful of constitutional issues. Public life in the United Kingdom is mostly reduced to celebrity, to the showy and shocking and sentimental. The media are not a spontaneous, uncoerced expression of our national psyche. They answer to corporate interests with little stake in Britain, determined to pressure nation states out of existence. It is not accidental that tradition is reduced to pageantry, and belonging is ignored. Without these, no account of why the Queen's death matters is adequate.
The affection demonstrated by so many people is no mystery. But does their good opinion even matter? Every spectacle needs an audience - is that all that it is? If the respect is uncompelled, it matters. Hundreds of thousands have travelled to pay their respects to the Queen, and carry with them the sympathies of thousands more who did not travel. Autocratic regimes still require - under compulsion - popular support from their populations, although their opinion explicitly does not matter. It is a performance that convinces no-one. Britain's freedom is imperfect and fragile, but the uncompelled actions of largely free people have a sincerity no television presenter can simulate. Whatever the pomp of a state funeral, without the uncoerced sympathy of the population there is no substance beneath the ceremony, and this is obvious to all.
The monarch matters because they embody the state. They represent all the state's activities, and all the lives to which the state's decisions apply. Minimally, a successful state must maintain its borders, law and order, and a viable economy. The head of state, symbolically, is the human agency directing the state's resources to those ends, and, as such, they embody the official narrative of the state. Britain has no written list of virtues to which the country is committed, so this official story is a sort of implied promise of safety and prosperity, and of recognition for those who work for the public good. It is that the state will do its best to provide a field of opportunity for the whole population, not just the regime and its cronies. We all have lives to make, and we depend on public benefits brought about by the actions of others. Most of them we will never meet, not least among them are those under arms, who might risk their lives for our safety. The head of state is the symbolic focus of those actions, of that culture. When the monarch promises to "serve the people", this is what those words mean.
The head of the nation must also stand for much that the state cannot do: the shared culture that makes community possible; the moral community underpinning the world of trade; the human bonds of family and friends. Without these, material wealth means little:
"As well as the place I love the people of Britain. In my travels around the place I've experienced nothing but welcome in England, Ireland, Wales and at home in Scotland. The British people I love are those whose voices have been silenced and ignored of late, those who want only to go honestly about their business, paying their dues and trying to make something good of themselves, and of the patch of the world in which they live. That Britain has fostered people like those, millions of them, silent witnesses all, is on its own the justification for the continued celebration of Britain..."
"..I love this place, but I also believe in it. ...There is a long list of countries that once were here, but are here no longer....There are landscapes set apart from the sea, but the lines drawn, and countries named, are figments of collective imagination, and made all the more meaningful as a result. They are what we say they are. The existence of our homelands is therefore an act of will, and also of love....You might say that a country is a dream shared by its inhabitants. As long as enough of us believe in the existence of Britain then the dream remains alive and the country is made real. If too many people stop believing or choose to believe in someplace else then the dream is over and the country ceases to exist, as completely as a candle flame blown out by the wind." (1)
To recognise this is an unforced tradition as old as human society, of gratitude for the soil you grew in. It is a concern for what is valuable, to protect it, and pass it on to those you care about. In a dense web of human meaning and belonging, Death itself is no tragedy, and turning the page does not change what is important.