BY SIMON EVANS
I first heard news of the Death of HM the Queen while sitting at The Oval, watching rain see off any chance of the first day’s play against South Africa. Mid-morning, someone who knew someone got one of those curt text messages that don’t make eye contact, but are rather pleased with themselves. Word is. Hearing that. Sounds like. The sort of thing that animate the betting fraternity, the old school hacks, the people who like brass tacks. And tacks don’t come much sharper or likely to puncture the confidence of the uninformed than this one.
Gradually, among the optimistically Panama-hatted a dry wind stirred. Whispers and murmurs and silently shared screens passed the news around. A pale fire swept the Pavillion. By about mid-afternoon, Huw Edwards had been seen wearing a black tie, and we knew that confirmation would not be long coming.
All grown men, no-one betrayed much emotion, but the prevailing conditions certainly didn’t clash with the mood. There might even have been a barely-registered sense of relief that the dismal weather had discreetly ensured a certain sobriety. And thankfully, I had time to absorb the news and gather my own, relatively unmediated thoughts. Get them tied down, before they were buffeted by the gales of take and counter-take on social media.
I’m grateful for that. I do have a somewhat old fashioned fondness for the Crown, but it’s not something I find easy to justify to neutrals, let alone the breezily hostile. It’s something closer to family feeling than a political position, and like family, some of them have behaved very badly. I wouldn’t want to have to make a case for them on purely objective terms, any more than I would for alcohol over modern, synthetic mood-enhancers, or Roast Beef over Huel.
But the Queen herself was something else. She rose far above any generalised notion I have of the benefits of constitutional monarchy. She was every inch the Oak of allegory. The Rock, the Northern Star, the still point at the centre of the turning world. By the time of her death, it had become all I could do not to capitalise her pronouns.
Her passing produced at least two strains of response from Republicans. There were some very generous tributes amounting to, “I am no Monarchist, but…” – usually, that they couldn’t help but see this was a woman who dedicated her life to service, and if not self-sacrifice then at least to the suppression of the modern celebrity’s sine qua non, self-expression.
Many failed to see that without a constitutional monarchy, the genuinely awe-inspiring spectacle of the last seventy years would simply not have been possible. It has not been exampled anywhere else in public life – nor anywhere else in the world. But still, they were gracious.
And then there were the less palatable, the cross grain, the self-congratulatory valour of those who refused to be “bullied” into expressing a grief they did not feel. “Forgive my not sharing this universal outpouring of fake, nauseating emotion,” one wrote, “but for many of us the Queen represents not some cuddly grandma or reassuring rock of ages but the dried-up husk of the dynasty that unleashed the most brutal, genocidal cruelties ever to sweep across our continent.”
This NYT provocateur, I knew, was trying to goad me into confirming her most cherished suspicion. Not, that the British were uniquely guilty- we were, in fact, merely better at Colonisation than any other European nation and even more markedly better at unwinding that great project when it became unfashionable.
No, the hope they cherish is that this lost glory continues to gnaw at our soul every day, as their masochistically appropriated ancestral humiliation clearly gnaws at theirs. They shall have no such satisfaction, because it is not true. And our unquestionably diminished role in the World gnawed at no soul less, I believe, than that of our late Queen.
But still, even among the published royal apologists, few seemed to understand that for the many of us, her death had something approaching a religious significance.
We sense when a Monarch dies, a glimmer of that imaginative sympathy that ancient men felt for their land, their chieftain and their tribe. That our ancestors felt in their very marrow. We hear a faint echo of resonant emotions that were, until very recently the most fundamental, the most necessary and characteristic of our species, let alone our race.
Those who don’t, must wonder if we aren’t half mad? But the perplexity, the disconnect stems from one of the most enduring fault lines to exist between strains of humanity. Namely, between those capable of naturally identifying with something larger, more ancient and vastly more ineffable than themselves, and those who seek to “create” identities, or select them from a catalogue that is updated as regularly as those from mail order firms such as Toast and Muffin and Fluff which drop onto the doormat every other day. Select them, and then aggressively assert them and demand respect.
Those of us who feel British naturally develop a sense of being represented by and invested in the Crown in a way that I think even football fans and K-Poppers might struggle to understand. This is a dimension not easily mappable onto the Cartesian co-ordinates of Homo Economicus.
It matters of course that the late Queen was so utterly exemplary, so worthy, so fit. After the passing of her husband and consort, and in her own failing health, Elizabeth II saw out the final duties of her life with a commitment, a kind of stoicism more familiar from old legends of faithful hounds than from anything you will read about in the obituaries of politicians and celebrities. She was perhaps the closest we will ever know, to the roman soldier in Spengler’s famous passage – “We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.”
Or a woman. When the onslaught came, she stood firm and was finally subsumed. But is it really possibly that she did not know the impact her dying in Balmoral might have, on the chances of the Union long surviving her own demise?
The famous picture of her taken at her Coronation, for all its pomp and circumstance of state, had a simple clarity of purpose to it that I found surprisingly moving when it was chosen for the front page of The Guardian last Friday. Indeed, the very name, The Guardian, seemed suddenly to resonate with unexpected double meaning. And then that last photograph, at Home, before the fireplace, her duties discharged, almost literally radiant with satisfaction..? Well. You either see it, or you don’t.
There is a quote from Hegel, that I first read in a book by Clive James.
Only with the falling of the Twilight, does the Owl of Minerva take flight.
The idea is that only as an era or epoch draw to a close, do we gain the wisdom of hindsight and begin to understand what has been going on. What ideas, or delusions, have been driving our insane behaviour this time around.
James cherished the hope that because he felt he had come to understand the era he had lived through and its extremes of grimness, brutality and totalitarian horror – that meant that it must be coming to an end. The owl has taken flight, ran his reverse logic, so surely this must be the twilight of those failed gods, bolshevism, fascism and the rest.
Minerva’s Owl had been cropping up in my thoughts a great deal in the two years leading up to September 2022. The exact reasons had remained obscure. I wasn’t sure if it was intimations of my own mortality, my career, after Covid, my time as a parent, or something else. But I’d had the sense of some sort of era coming to a close – of a pretty large owl shuffling along its branch, fluffing up its wings, preparing to address itself to the deepening dark. On the 8th of September, all became clear.
Twilight has finally settled. The Owl has taken flight and all the little, private deaths I’ve chronicled over the last few years seem now to somehow be nestling beneath those silent, spreading wings.
As the Owl flies upwards, a whole epoch is laid beneath him, like a river in the moonlight. Up it winds and back, this river, back to a bubbling spring, girlish laughs and giggles and games, and no apprehension of what lay ahead.
Down it winds, down and out past Castle, Palace and State, through an ever changing landscape, a slender silver ribbon, widening as it slows, but gaining confidence and strength and broadening into a mighty, ceaseless course of duty, devotion, simplicity and faith. Flowing out, out of the land and out of our lives and merging, finally, at peace in the silver sea.
Simon Evans is a well-known Comedian. This article is taken from Country Squire Magazine’s March 15th 2022 print edition. The print edition – a Coronation Edition – can be subscribed to here.