By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, September 08, 2022
If I were to set up a country from
scratch, it would not have a monarch. But Britain, my country of birth, has
already been set up. Which makes the material question not whether Britain
ought to have a monarchy, but whether the monarchy — and, indeed, the monarch —
that Britain has can be considered worthwhile. For more than
70 years, Queen Elizabeth II made it easy to answer that question with a
resounding “Yes.” She was a model of duty, honesty, and hard work, and for
those admirable qualities she will immediately be missed.
Elizabeth’s longevity was remarkable. This
week, she invited the 15th prime minister of her reign to form a government.
Her first PM was Winston Churchill, who was first elected to Parliament in 1900
— when Queen Victoria was still on the throne. Elizabeth was queen during
Beatlemania, during the Moon Landing, during the Cold War, during the unrest of
the late 1970s and early 1980s, during 9/11, during the war in Iraq, during the
2008 financial meltdown, and beyond. Like Victoria’s before hers, her epoch
will need to be split up to be understood: Early Elizabethan, mid-Elizabethan,
late-Elizabethan, and so forth. The world of 1952, when she took the throne,
bears little resemblance to the world of 2022 — except, perhaps, that in both
worlds, she was the queen of England. That, too, has now changed.
I have never known another king or queen
of England. The postage stamps, mailboxes, banknotes, coins, and phone booths
have looked the same for my entire life. For a while, as a child, I simply
assumed that women oversaw the government. The monarch was a woman, as was the
prime minister. That, I figured, was simply the way England worked. My mother,
who was born a few days after Elizabeth was crowned, knew otherwise, but she,
too, has no memory of a Britain without this queen in Buckingham Palace. In her
70 years, presidents, prime ministers, and dictators have come and gone.
Countries have, too: My mother’s first atlas referenced the Soviet Union; the
map on her phone now says Russia. Throughout these changes, the queen was a
constant. To my mother’s ears, “king” will sound awfully jarring.
That king will be Elizabeth’s eldest son,
Charles. About him, the jokes are both obvious and cruel; Charleses, as you may
know, have not tended to do particularly well at being English monarchs.
Recently, a wag told me that Charles “has waited 74 years to take his first job.”
There is some truth to this — nothing can prepare a person for being king. But,
of course, those years were not entirely wasted: From childhood, Charles has
watched his mother work and, hopefully, learned a great deal from the watching.
Whether what he has seen will allow him to overcome his own destructive
instincts I cannot say.
Still, history rarely works out how one
imagines it will, and this is most certainly true of Elizabeth II, who was not
destined from birth to be a queen of England at all — let alone to be the
longest-reigning monarch in British history and the second-longest-reigning
monarch in the history of the world, after Louis XIV. Elizabeth became queen
only because her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne, and his
replacement — her father, George VI — died unexpectedly at the age of 56. When,
in 1952, Winston Churchill heard the news, he is said to have cried, “But she’s
just a child!” before thinking back to the first time he’d met her, in 1928,
when she was just two and a half, and recalling the remarkable “air of
authority” that she had exhibited even then.
Sometimes, destiny moves along crooked
lines.
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