Britain’s longest-serving monarch has died.
It feels like a death in the family. Born in 1926, the year John Logie Baird first publicly demonstrated television, and crowned in 1953, the year Joseph Stalin died, the Queen has been with us so long that only a fraction of the population can remember life without her. her.
She reigned longer than any other British monarch, easily surpassing her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Following the principle of “I must be seen to be believed”, she met countless people in person and touched the lives of billions through radio and television. Who doesn’t remember her Christmas broadcast? Or the comfort she provided during the COVID-19 pandemic when she quoted Vera Lynn’s promise that “we’ll meet again.”
He’s gone now.
The miracle of the monarchy is how it survived in a democratic and egalitarian age. Everything it stands for—inheritance rather than merit and recognition rather than election—is the antithesis of everything we hold dear as a civilization. However, the British monarchy not only survived, but also prospered. He made none of the compromises of the cycling monarchies of the Scandinavian world. In fact, he almost relished resisting compromise.
How did this happen? In preparation for her job, the Queen was given a handbook on how to survive the acid of modernity. That was Walter Bagehot’s great book The English Constitution, published in 1867 at the height of Victorian brio. When she was a child, the Vice-Provost of Eton College, Henry Marten, made regular visits to Windsor Castle to instruct her in her constitutional duties, placing particular emphasis on Bagehot’s wisdom. Nothing about this experience was normal. Marten addressed the lonely princess as “gentlemen” and lectured her as if she were a class of Etonians. Even more surreal was what he taught her when he was channeled by Bagehot: that Britain was a “republic in disguise”, that the best qualification for a monarch was stupidity, and that the task was to spend life as a frivolous distraction from the real business of government.
Bagehot thought that statesmanship was too serious to be left to the masses. Rather, it was necessary to leave the rule to a small elite of serious-minded men who understood the world. But how could you get people to accept such a situation in a democratizing age? The answer was dispersion through the monarchy. Bagehot hoped that people would focus on the magnificent royal families in their gilded carriages leading the great parade, while “the real rulers are hidden in secondary carriages”. “No one cares or inquires about them, but they are unreservedly and unconsciously obeyed because of the splendor of those who overshadowed and preceded them.”
In Bagehot’s scheme, the royal family was to be transformed from a relic of aristocratic society into an embodiment of bourgeois virtues. Victoria was tasked with being the empress of India and at the same time the pinnacle of a friendly marriage. But Elizabeth II. she had to abandon Bagehot’s playbook and invent an entirely new one. No one today believes that the Queen ruled as well as she did – and if they did, they would be right to demand change. The idea that the monarchy is essentially a show is taken for granted. It is distraction in the sense of distraction rather than disguise.
The family dimension of this show is widely celebrated. The monarchy is never more popular than when it gives us great editions of life cycle events like births, marriages and deaths. Yet today’s monarchy has singularly failed in its attempt to project itself as the perfect middle-class family sitting at the pinnacle of British society. Far from being role models, the Windsors are haunted by extreme versions of common family ills—divorce, adultery, betrayal, hypocrisy. If we celebrated fairytale marriages, we also watched in horror as they descended into hellish bitterness.
The Queen’s genius lay in understanding that monarchy provides not a distraction but a counterbalance to the imperatives of modern life. Clever courtiers like to point out the way she kept up with the times and modernized the Firm, as she liked to call it. “Everything’s changed but the scarf,” says one, leaving aside such trifles as Windsor Castle and Balmoral.
The Queen’s most visible achievement has been to provide an element of continuity in a world in a frenzy of change. It embodied the civilizing power of tradition, which balances change without resorting to the bloviation of direct reaction. Robert Hardman, perhaps the most perceptive of Britain’s strange tribe of royal watchers, puts it well: “She is the living incarnation of a set of values and a period of history. In Britain, it’s Tower Bridge and a red double-decker bus on two legs, not to mention Big Ben, afternoon tea, village fetes and sheep-spotted hills in the rain. In the wider world, he’s a newsreel character that just continued to move into digital high definition.”
Several people objected to the social world it embodies: It is a piece of the 1950s preserved in the 1920s, and a piece of the old upper classes in a multicultural and demotic age. Her greatest passion was the sport of kings, horse racing; she spent her holidays hunting, shooting and fishing at Balmoral; her adventurers were dukes and counts. One of the remarkable things about her reign, however, was that republicanism was killed like a stone. For the more the world changes, the more we long for points of continuity. And whatever we think of filming weekends at Balmoral, we can all agree on the merits of double-decker buses and Big Ben.
The Queen lived a life of duty in an age when duty goes out of fashion. She devoted her life to fulfilling her duties – and not just the big duties of inaugurating Parliament and going on royal tours, but also the small ones like opening hospitals and participating in charity events. She lived her whole life in the public eye – even when on holiday she never kept a low profile – and traveled abroad tirelessly to keep alive the idea of the Commonwealth, one of her greatest passions. When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria did not appear in public for years, earning her the nickname “The Widow of Windsor” and stirring republican sentiment. When Prince Philip died, the Queen was almost back at work the next day.
Some of her endless duties could be fascinating. She has met more world leaders than anyone else in the world, including not only 13 US presidents, but also such near-mythical figures as Winston Churchill (who intimidated her when she first ascended the throne), Charles de Gaulle and Nelson Mandela.
Although she met fascinating people, she was constrained by royal protocol: Most of what she did must surely be tedious. Can anyone really enjoy cutting ribbons or watching folk dance or knighting disc jockeys? Prince Philip once remarked that it was a life no one would choose or volunteer for (especially, one might add, if you inherited enough money to live a life of irresponsible self-indulgence). But the Queen has never failed to understand that what may seem like an ordinary meeting to her is the only time a nurse or carer can meet the monarch.
Her devotion to duty went hand in hand with an unfailing air of dignity. Again, this is a counterweight to an increasingly demotic world where a reality TV star can become President of the United States, a man who has been fired repeatedly for lying can become Prime Minister of Britain, and the airwaves are increasingly dominated by raving maniacs. The Queen was the center of an alternate world in which everything was in its place and there was a place for everything.
We were hard on Bagehot and his idea of the monarch as a distraction. But equally central to his argument is the idea that the British constitution is based on the distinction between the dignified branch of government and the effective branch. A dignified constitution refers to permanent institutions that exist in a sort of Platonic ideal world. The effective part belongs to the volatile world of politicians and their power struggles. The queen’s job was to embody the former and ultimately bow to the latter. She had to read the program of the then government and at the same time embody the dignity of the state.
Queen Elizabeth did both jobs brilliantly and played a major role in transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of self-governing nations.
There will be much talk about the future of the monarchy in the coming months as the initial shock of the Queen’s death wears off. This division of powers has certainly become more rather than less important in recent years as the culture wars have raged and tempers have flared. The American belief that the president is both a political actor and head of state has been deeply tested by Trump’s presidency. In Britain it is possible to hate Liz Truss or Keir Starmer but still happily attend state functions. The Queen pulled off a remarkable trick in maintaining a monarchy that was both majestic and apolitical. The measure of her success is that the new monarch will be largely judged by his ability to pull off the exact same trick.