Thoughts on her late Majesty The Queen, By J.L. Reiter
I am more moved by the death of Queen Elizabeth II than by that of anyone I have never personally met. She was a constant, dependable presence throughout one’s life, and a bridge to a glorious past. Watching the pageantry and circumstance honouring her life and mourning her passing makes me proud to be English, of our great history and unique traditions. I am not the slightest bit ashamed of feeling this, either. I am well aware that people in the past did things we would not do today, but I judge them by their times and not by mine. Progress isn’t linear – people are more equal today than ever in history, and they live materially better, but we are also growing more shallow, ignorant, and intolerant, and our social fabric is decaying beyond repair.
One thing was clear to me when I heard the news that the Queen had died; living in this poisonous media age, I did not want to read anything about it. First, her story is well known to anyone who read the newspapers. She is woven into the fabric of British and Commonwealth history. The leftist hacks at the American newspapers and websites, after a respectful hour or so of noting her death and perhaps some of her lifetime’s work, would soon produce petty click-bait based invective illustrating their historical ignorance, woke nonsense, and a general hatred of British history and life. I have no interest in Vanity Fair’s thoughts on “what will the Queen’s death mean for the relationship between William and Harry?” I certainly am not going to pay $350 a year for some wanker at Foreign Policy to tell me about “Her Empire’s Sins” as if they were hers personally, nor do I care about the views of any other wonk mediocrity looking for a sexy new angle on the death of a beloved and irreplaceable monarch. People like these won’t rest until every last history book, museum, and mind in the West has been “de-colonized,” and our complex, fascinating ancestors reduced to stereotypical straw-men they can compare unfavourably to their ‘enlightened’ woke selves.
Twitter was bound to be a nexus of ugliness for petty minds desperate for 15 seconds of fame, but some of it was bound to bleed into respectable streams. Still, I don’t give a toss what some Nigerian professor of applied bollocks at a second-rate university thinks. I refuse to get in the mud with these self-serving people.
I’ve always been a staunch monarchist, as conservatives tend to be. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of history can tell you that the sovereign is the essential heart of the British state, a center that could not be replaced by anything that wasn’t better, which is unimaginable. As Churchill said of democracy, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” So it is with the monarchy; faute de mieux.
Britain’s monarchy has evolved from the absolute kings of the early middle ages, through gradual limitations including the Magna Carta, to what it is today; a symbolic, but irreplaceable core of the entire system. The Queen did her job with grace, charm, and dignity, just as she promised us long ago in 1947. Charles III will put a foot wrong now and then, but he’ll make a solid King. This transition will be more like William I to William II, not Edward I to Edward II. The crown is in safe hands. Prince William (of Wales, now) is a sensible, calm chap like his grandfather and uncle Edward, not like his brother and uncle Andrew. He’ll be fine too when his time comes. The British monarchy will outlive anyone alive today.
When Prince Phillip died in April 2021, it was obvious that even our indefatigable Queen would take it hard. They had been an extraordinary partnership for 75 years. Still, she kept working and doing her duty faithfully as she always had until her own time came, with not the slightest observable loss of wits until the end. It was a blessing to her and to the nation that her body and mind expired at the same time, unlike her ancestor George III, whose incapacity for years at a time led to instability and the country being ill-led through a decade-long Regency.
I am one of Generation X, the aging children of the baby boomers, where the societal rot started. The Queen was born in 1926, before all that nonsense. Her discipline, sense of duty and service, self-abnegation, decency, discretion, and judgment were extraordinary to see in one person, but they were also the desired paradigms of anyone from her time. Today, people mostly try to self-actualise, or promote their ‘brands,’ or failing that, to be victims. The dreadful Megan Markle and Harry exemplify this generation, where Will and Kate are a bit of a throwback, thank God. In the Queen’s time, getting on with things, not complaining, maintaining family honor and self-discipline, were the way people were expected (though of course didn’t always) to behave. She did, like few before her. May she rest in peace.
God Save the King.