On the afternoon of the Queen’s death, I was attending a conference of the Common Sense Society on history and politics at Bowood House, a splendid stately home owned by the Lansdowne family, planted confidently in Wiltshire’s heart of England. Apart from a few people, mainly lecturers, most of the conference attendees were not British but drawn from the United States, Hungary and other European countries. And it would not have been surprising (at least in theory) if they had not wanted to pay particular attention to the Queen’s passing. In fact almost all of them asked the organisers to…