Three years ago, before Queen Elizabeth’s death, I argued that, when she went, “many older Britons will experience trauma”. Her death would be, for millions, “the cutting of a living cord, a break in history … the very ground will seem to move”. Three years later, on firm ground, I must look myself in the mirror.
I did add that many others, including many younger Britons, “would wonder vaguely what all the fuss was about”. But my prediction of some kind of emotional earthquake was pretty general. For The New York Times, for instance, her death “was a genuinely traumatic event, leaving many in this stoic country anxious and unmoored”. Liz Truss, the prime minister at the time, called it “a huge shock to the nation”. Sir Keir Starmer spoke of a time of uncertainty “where our country feels caught between a past it cannot relive and a future yet to be revealed”.
Crowds line the Royal Mile in Edinburgh to see the Queen’s coffin being carried to St Giles’ Cathedral
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Even making all allowances for the shock of the moment, there was a general sense that the demise of such a long-lived monarch would mark a wider break or caesura in the national story, something going far beyond the private sadness of royal enthusiasts.
The long queues to say goodbye to her, a certain reflectiveness across the media, implied the same.
Yet, wasn’t all this wildly wrong? What happened to the great national rumble? If we look around today, on the third anniversary of her death, surprisingly little seems to have changed at all.
The monarchy continues as a quiet presence away from the centre of national life. The King, elderly, restrained, a man of goodwill, seems to offer reassurance and continuity, much as his mother did. It is hard to believe that Queen Camilla was once a source of controversy and suspicion. The younger royals’ soap opera of rivalry continues almost unchanged from the later years of Queen Elizabeth. The institution ages and may not appeal as it once did, but is not fractured.
There is quiet progress towards a national memorial for Queen Elizabeth at St James’s Park in London and work has started behind some public toilets in Regent’s Park for a commemorative garden. But the changes to the postal stamps and money, the swapping of KC for QC, the small adjustment to the national anthem, has all passed very calmly and without much notice.
It would be wrong to criticise the memorial planned for central London because all we have seen is early images from Foster + Partners. But if there is hesitation about how to look back, about the meaning of the reign, this seems manifest in the plans. There will be an elegant glass bridge over the pond, full of light and symbolism. For the traditionalists, a rather plodding-looking equestrian statue is planned, although there will be others too — of Prince Philip and the couple together — for those wanting a more informal note.
Artists’ impressions of the Foster + Partners memorials planned for St James’s Park in London include a glass bridge, an equestrian statue, and another of Queen Elizabeth II with Prince Philip
PA
There is to be a lot of gardening, for who could object to gardening? And for those wanting a more modern feel, there will be a wind sculpture by Yinka Shonibare, featuring floral designs inspired by the late Queen’s coronation gown.
Something, then, for everyone. It may work well together but it feels, ahead of the final designs next spring, somewhat tentative and unsure — even half apologetic. Geographically, the memorial will be adjacent to the huge Queen Victoria monument in front of Buckingham Palace. Imaginatively, however, it will be in a different world.
Although Victoria was completed only in 1924, she belongs to another age entirely. A disapproving-looking monarch sits atop a writhing phantasmagoria, bulging with marble representations of constancy, courage, motherhood, justice, truth, progress and possibly apple pie too. She is buttressed by mermaids and mermen to represent naval might, and surrounded by snarling lions and torch-bearing youth.
The Victoria memorial
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The Victoria monument is, in its way, rather glorious, and won its sculptor, Thomas Brock, a knighthood. But Brock’s bloated stone and gilt funerary eruption of imperial swagger offers a way of explaining the current relative silence about Elizabeth II today.
It is really about power, conquest and military might. No surprise there: the grandest national memorials are often erected by military powers at moments of pomp and triumph, from the vast Second World War Soviet memorial The Motherland Calls in Volgograd to the Arc de Triomphe itself, designed at the height of Napoleonic expansionism.
The Motherland Calls monument in Volgograd
ALAMY
We are not that kind of people any more. Even thinking on the scale of the Albert Memorial, that similarly exuberant gothic spaceship, for instance, would feel somehow embarrassing today — too boastful; too swaggering; just not us.
The Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, London
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Through most of its history, the monarchy and the military have been completely intertwined. Today, with an army of fewer than 74,000 full-time soldiers and only 16 major warships, the British military has declined dramatically, and this has, inevitably, affected the monarchy to which it swears allegiance. For all those hours she sat on a horse watching the Life Guards clatter past, or rows of bobbing bearskins, the late Queen understood the realities very well.
She took the Commonwealth very seriously, as a kind of afterlife of empire, but that too is in decline.
And indeed, a lot of Queen Elizabeth’s popularity was about her realistic modesty; her personally understated and frugal style. She never forgot that she was Queen and believed the institution had to maintain a certain scale, and yet she hated swank. I suspect she would have regarded a grander national memorial to herself, bulging with marble symbolism, as something tasteless, to be giggled at from behind a curtain. The monuments to her own parents were almost domestic.
So, what happened to that terrible national trauma of three years ago? First, a lot of genuine grieving and sadness did happen, distributed silently round the country, and still goes on in private homes — when people are walking the dog, or reflecting on old photographs.
Mourners outside Balmoral the day after the Queen’s death in September 2022
KARWAI TANG/WIREIMAGE
This is a quite intimate matter. When we lose a relative, if we loved them, then they stay. They do not quite leave us, muttering advice at unexpected moments, appearing at the edge of things like shadows, until they eventually fade away. The same is surely true of national figures on whom we have projected a relationship.
Second, there has been plenty to take our minds off the passing of even such a long-lived monarch. Those who expected Charles III to be a poor king, an interfering head of state who would have us yearning quickly for his mother, have been confounded. He hasn’t interfered. He has been dignified and turned up whenever he could. That is all that was needed.
Queen Elizabeth died at a time when the country seemed politically deeply divided, and politics was an embarrassing Tory soap opera. For all the earnest attempts of a new Labour government to “turn the page”, the country seems today even angrier and more divided than it was then. Scandal, as we see this weekend, has not vanished from Westminster. We have not learnt how to be more productive. We are no safer. If Elizabeth was the embodiment of “don’t make a fuss, keep quiet, carry on, be kind” then perhaps we need her stoicism more than we need her statues.
Beyond all this, perhaps there is an even wider message. Broadly speaking, a modern democracy is an agglomeration of individuals and families trying peaceably to get on with their lives together in a defined area. It is not an incandescent national idea. It is not the projection of a leader’s personality through the state. We think about ourselves before we think about monarchs or epochs. And perhaps, unromantically, that is how it should be.