“Ring out the old, ring in the new,”
wrote Tennyson on the death of his much-loved friend. We proclaim, “The Queen is dead, long live the King”, but it feels too sudden, too soon, too sharp a turn in our lives. The death of a queen is painful—it hurts. We do not have to ask,
“O death, where is thy sting?”
because we know—the nation feels the sting of death. It is as if a member of our own family has departed. Weirdly, we feel as if we ought to tell members of our family who have long departed the news. Even Google, with its brightly coloured logo, is grey today, which is sort of ironic for Her Majesty, who wore every colour under the sun at some point in her life.
The poet, priest and Member of Parliament, John Donne, said when preaching at Whitehall in 1627 that the protection against a fearful death was a life devoted to a calling. That is exactly what it was—a life devoted to a calling. How often must the Queen have thought, “Not another opening. Not another royal variety performance. Not another unfunny comedian. Not another Prime Minister.” Yet she did her duty. In the words of the promise of the boy scouts and the guides,
“to do my best to do my duty to God and to the Queen”.
She did her duty to herself.
I pledged my allegiance to the Queen 10 times as a clergyman and as Member of Parliament—we all have—and to her heirs and successors. In a sense, that is not personal at all. Our allegiance was to her as Head of State—the embodiment of our shared life as the United Kingdom—but I suspect that we felt that we all owed allegiance to her personally, because she had earned her moral authority. She donned a uniform to do her bit to fight fascism. She could not lead us into battle, or give us laws, or administer justice, but she gave us her heart and her devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations, as she faithfully promised in 1957.
There are other queens. I have met a few—but then again, too few to mention. However, we—and, I note, the President of France—call only one the Queen
The Queen’s face was on the coins my constituents started producing at the Royal Mint in Llantrisant in 1953. However, to mix my poets, she knew that
“Our little systems have their day”—
we are
“Dress’d in a little brief authority”.
I know that some people deify the monarchy, but that is to miss the point: the point is the humanity of the monarchy. Richard II, under whose great hammerbeam ceiling Her Majesty will lie in state in a few days’ time, is given a great speech by Shakespeare, which ends:
“You have mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want
Taste grief, need friends”—
not just bread, of course, but marmalade sandwiches as well.
Most movingly of all, the Queen was as human as any other widow in losing her husband, her consort, her life companion. None will forget her sitting alone at Philip’s funeral. It is a sign of their enduring love that her and Philip’s deaths came closer in time than those of any other reigning monarch and their consort in our history. I thank God that it was in her reign that men were able to declare their love to one another, and women were able to do the same.
I end with words that have never felt more appropriate than for our longest-reigning monarch, who lived through holocaust and war, and led us through years of unimaginable turbulence:
“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”
God save the King.
2.56 pm