God Save the King

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 arrange a tribute to Her late Majesty at the final dinner that evening.

That duty fell to me as the senior Brit (at least in age).

Obviously, the tribute could hardly end with a toast, and the question arose as to what its closing words should be. We agreed easily after the briefest of discussions, and I ended my remarks about her extraordinary life of duty with the standard formula after a royal death: “The Queen is dead. Long live the King.”

To my surprise—and as the other diners confirmed later, to their surprise too—they all responded in unison and forcefully: “Long live the King.” It was a slightly eerie experience, and after a few moments into the dinner we fell to discussing the significance of their united response which seemed to come from some deeper place than nostalgia, human sympathy or even just conventional respect—maybe from some place that encompassed all of those sentiments and more.

Was it personal admiration for Queen Elizabeth’s life, that placed duty above all else? Or an unexpected realisation of the special dignity that a monarchy brings to government (often a sordid business)? Or a reflection of the fact that the Queen met thousands of people and visited all the Commonwealth countries so that many people felt that they had a personal contact with her? Or an ominous sense that our age is passing away with her death and perhaps replaced by something worse?

One can make a case that all of these factors played a part. There’s a pleasing irony in the thought that the world’s conscious knowledge of her unswerving duty may be an unintended consequence of The Crown’s opening season with a powerful depiction of the vow that the then Princess Elizabeth famously gave in a broadcast from South Africa in 1946: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or
short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”
Never has a vow been more faithfully kept. That she kept the vow to the British people is reflected in by the expressions of irritated respect for her from Britain’s few avowed republicans as much as in the crowds that sang for her outside Buckingham Palace at successive jubilees. Reigning for seventy years, dealing with fifteen prime ministers (and fourteen US presidents) and negotiating the formal side of crises from the Suez affair to the Covid pandemic, she almost never put a foot wrong. And on the rare occasions when she may have done so—as in the Commonwealth crisis over Rhodesia—she left no footprint.

There was skill and prudence as well as virtue behind that record. She was careful to observe the limits on her power and influence that the status of constitutional monarch imposed on her. The single most
important such restraint was that she should avoid making politically controversial statements. Necessary in itself to ensure constitutional fairness between the political parties, that convention also protects the monarch’s ability to act as a constitutional umpire when a major political row threatens conflict or instability. There have been many crises during her reign, but we don’t know of one that threatened the constitution or that flowed from a blunder by her. All the prime ministers who served her from both major parties testify to the soundness and prudence of the advice she gave them. Even in the present atmosphere of celebratory grief, their unanimous testimony can’t be dismissed.

Recall, however, that the young Princess Elizabeth’s vow was to “our great imperial family to which we all belong”. As I pointed out in a review of The Crown in these pages: since 1947 massive social and political changes have scattered and wounded both the imperial and royal families. That did not deter the Queen from continuing to serve them, to hold together those who wished to be held together, and to do so with more success than some commentators have acknowledged. At the time of her death she was the head of state of fourteen other “realms”, including of course Australia (where a restive establishment is as yet deterred by popular sentiment from replacing her by one of their own). She took those relationships very seriously, receiving all the state papers, going through her red boxes every night—and sometimes giving a helping hand to a government in distress. She was far more realistic and helpful in the Grenada crisis, for instance, than the Foreign Office, urging that US intervention be welcomed because it restored civil government. In the course of these duties, she visited Commonwealth countries more than two hundred times. She is estimated to have shaken more hands than any other person in history.

If a constitutional monarchy has an advantage over other national symbols, it is that it’s personal. That’s a disadvantage too, as the reigns of Charles II and Edward VIII showed. But as the extraordinary large silent crowds lining the streets revealed, almost all her subjects have felt her death as a personal loss. She has been the sovereign for the entire life of anyone under the age of seventy. It’s said that the number of just her British subjects she met amounted to about a third of the UK population.

Even I met her twice—once when she visited the offices of the Daily Telegraph in the year of her Silver Jubilee, another time when I received a decoration from her after serving in government. We exchanged two sentences, and then as I had been warned, the Queen signified that the interview was over. How did she signify this? Blessed if I know, but I did know somehow, bowed, and returned to my appointed seat. Millions of people had some such contact with her, and remember it vividly. Of course, knowing her better was the ultimate card in one-upmanship. When Norman St John Stevas, a cabinet minister in the Thatcher government, was accused of being a name-dropper, he replied with mock modesty: “I know. The Queen was saying that to me only last night.”

Admittedly, the Queen did take a risk by defying Walter Bagehot, the Victorian author and constitutional pundit, who had argued that the monarchy couldn’t survive too much publicity because you can’t “let daylight in upon magic”. She welcomed the cameras into her family circle, and they showed a nice, friendly, middle-class family, living a private life much like the rest of Britain only with larger responsibilities. Unfortunately, nice, friendly, middle-class English families were changing everywhere under the delayed 1960s impact of “sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll”, divorce and family breakdown. The royals were not sufficiently different from the rest of us, which led in time to the psychodrama of the marriage of Charles and Diana, their and other royal divorces, the death of Diana—all under the microscopes of television and the tabloids—and what looked like a national popular uprising of aggressive sentimentality against Her Majesty for failing to mourn Diana with sufficient emotional expressiveness.

The truth in that moment was that the Queen (and her consort, Prince Philip) were different. They were stoic and reserved, formed in a war when friends died weekly in battle but life had to go on. That shaped their responses and soon won understanding and respect. The crises never stopped coming. But with every crisis she seemed to grow in strength, authority and deftness. She perfected the art of conveying more than she said on issue after issue. One the day after 9/11, she made no statement but ordered the Guards’ band outside Buckingham Palace to play “The Star-Spangled Banner”—something that the Americans at the Wiltshire conference recalled. In a talk that calmed public anxieties on the Covid pandemic, she ended, “We will meet again,” echoing the wartime Vera Lynn song. On the first official royal visit to the Republic of Ireland since the 1920s, she appeared at a garden of remembrance for those who had fallen in the Troubles, and expressed regret for “things that should have been done differently, or not at all”. After Harry and Meghan’s tell-all-and-more television interview, she issued a statement that replied mildly: “Recollections may vary.” When we saw her grieving alone in black at the funeral of her beloved husband, she said: “Grief is the price we pay for love,” and after an interval resumed her official duties.

In short, she let daylight in upon magic, but the magic didn’t vanish, because it wasn’t magic—or at least not only magic. It was wisdom, balance and the accumulated experience of seventy years of service to empire, Commonwealth and nation. Having fulfilled her vow, she has finally laid aside her burden of duty. She now goes to the God whom she served so well for so long.  

Charles has therefore inherited kingship from her by right and succeeded as Head of the Commonwealth not by right but by the collective invitation of its prime ministers. It’s hard not to see that as another of his mother’s achievements. These are literally awesome duties. He seems to have the same sense of duty as his mother but he faces greater challenges than she did in 1952. Does the monarchy he now incarnates enjoy the same popular support? Polls in recent years have shown only about a quarter of the British population favouring a republic. But the world in which the King must exercise his new powers and influence is a more ominous one than 1952. And that’s one reason why we declared “God Save the King” so thunderously.