Even in death she outranked us. Elizabeth Windsor died on 8 September, 2022; four days later I joined a crowd of mourners in the grounds of Westminster Abbey. Tourists gawped through the railings. We were not there for her. Death also comes to subjects and citizens: my friends and I had gathered for the previously-arranged funeral of a friend gone too young at 39, held in the Abbey’s adjoining church of St Margaret’s where he had sung in the choir.
But royal deaths impose new rules on commoner grief. The Abbey’s bells were forbidden to toll for the man we mourned – they were on a new, royal schedule. His coffin could not be carried through the Abbey ground or processed into the church as planned. There were fears, not ill-grounded given the looks we attracted, that onlookers might confuse it for the coffin of the Queen and mob us. The Abbey staff were kind and thoughtful, forced as they were to absorb our private mourning rites into a grid of public, choreographed grief.
Somehow, I couldn’t find myself to be outraged. In the first days following the Queen’s death, a handful of my republican friends offered performative noises about the number of resources expanded to mark the death of a nonagenarian; the disruption to other people’s life events, like our funeral. I have always found a 21st century monarchy illogical. Yet it felt right, almost inevitable, that private griefs should now be subsumed within a shared national emotion.
One by one, my fellow royalty-sceptics would each fail in their attempts to stand aloof from the collective experience. As we waited on that excruciatingly slow Thursday for bulletins from Balmoral, one friend insisted that “there’s bigger news in the world – I simply don’t care”. Within a fortnight, she had taken up therapy again to process the surprise and shock of her grief-stricken reaction. The Queen’s funeral had brought back the pain of losing her own mother.
The Royal Family shadow our lives. We celebrate their weddings, we mourn at their funerals, we remember which ones embarrassed which at Christmas five years ago. They resonate, because they remind us of our own families; for better or worse, they are present at each of our life’s landmarks. This is particularly true if, like me, you are of a generation with key figures in the family. William and Kate – just a few years older than I – got married, had kids, sent those kids to school just at the time my contemporaries did.
The death of Prince Philip had previously occurred at a moment in the Covid-19 pandemic when many families, just like the royals, could not hold full funerals for their loved ones; nonetheless, the Prince Consort was accompanied to his small ceremonial funeral by a military procession. One friend who had recently lost her mother said to me at the time: “I don’t begrudge them gun carriages, drums, marching bands. Every single one of us should get that for our parents, if we can. The world should stop and the drums should sound each time a person dies.” Most of us can’t stop the world for our parents, but we can silence the telephones and muffle the drums once a generation, and pretend we’re doing it for a family named Mountbatten-Windsor.
Is all this – the catharsis they occasionally provide, their convening power in collective ritual – enough to give the Royal Family a purpose in the year 2023? Britain’s younger generations think not. Figures released this week by the polling company YouGov show that only a 37 per cent minority of people between 18-24 are happy for Britain to remain a monarchy, with 40 per cent actively preferring an elected head of state. (Numbers for older people are, of course, higher.)
If the Queen’s funeral proved that even we republicans could be stirred to emotion by music and monarchy, it was swiftly followed by the enthusiasm gap of the King’s coronation. The young Queen Elizabeth was a personal mystery when she came to the throne – her voice had barely been heard in public. It was harder to project our dreams onto a King about whom we had all already heard and seen too much, with his 73 tarnished years in the public eye. It didn’t help that he squabbled over a leaky pen in public – he was exhausted, yes, but had his mother ever behaved like this? – and that his coronation was marred by the repressive arrests of peaceful protesters, and even of a devoted royal fan in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To those of us who just can’t get on board ideologically with monarchy, the structural problems remain. As I wrote a few weeks ago: “The justification of British monarchy used to go a little like this. Monarchs don’t meddle in politics, we were told, except when they really need to. Then, at moments of constitutional crisis, a Good King might step into resolve a deadlock, or uphold an institutional norm.”
Except that in a world which can’t stomach the hereditary principle as anything more than decorative, the monarchy lacks the basic authority to fulfil this role. Hence the monarchy’s impotence even as democratic norms have crumbled in the past five years – the late Queen was unable even to prevent the unlawful prorogation of parliament.
Twenty years ago, I joined the anti-monarchist group Republic as a teenager. (I let my membership lapse years ago, as one does.) Back then, Blairism still set the political weather and “meritocracy” was something liberals believed in, not a punchline used to mock structural inequality. We thought that the coming challenge to the British monarchy would be the inevitable march of individualism– a bourgeois revolution of upper middle-class intellectuals.
Instead, the monarchy’s biggest political crisis has come from the mainstreaming of post-colonial and anti-imperial politics. The monarchy guards its secrets closely – it was announced last week that Foreign Office files on Prince Andrew will not be released for a further 65 years – but it has nonetheless been pressured into granting access to an independent research project studying the links between the Royal Family and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Meghan Markle’s complaints about her experience of racism – despite her profound unpopularity in Britain – have kept the issue at the top of the royal news agenda.
Will any of this be enough to topple the monarchy? It is unlikely anytime soon. What we have learned is that the monarchy’s future is likely to rest on Britain’s instincts, not our ideologies. Those 11 days in September 2022 between a monarch’s death and monarch’s funeral opened up a world we had not inhabited before. Avowed republicans found themselves sucked into the 24-hour queue to file past the royal coffin in Westminster Hall. Anti-imperialists wept in the streets. We were reminded that as humans, we are not rational animals. The future of the British monarchy can not be rational either.
