Summary: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passed away this morning at Balmoral at the incredible age of 96. She was for the vast majority of her subjects, the only monarch they had ever known. She was one of that Greatest Generation whose members are passing into eternity at a rate of approximately 1100 per day. We knew this day would come. As much as we might have fondly hoped in our hearts that The Queen was eternal, our minds reminded us of what we now know to be true. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was not eternal. But while she lived and reigned, she gave to Great Britain, to the Commonwealth, and to the United States a kind of stability that we must now hope King Charles III can continue to embody. God save the King.
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Cathedral City — September 8, 2022. The world is in syncope this afternoon. The girl once known as Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the daughter of the then-Duke of York and his Duchess, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and known for more than 70 years as Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, supreme Governor of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith, Head of the Commonwealth, passed away this morning at Balmoral Castle in the Scots Highlands.
Her Majesty died at the incredible age of 96. Her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, predeceased her, dying at the equally incredible age of 99. While we may wonder at the genetics which made possible two such seemingly eternal lifespans, we should also wonder at the stability Elizabeth II represented, and the often astonishing strength of Her Majesty’s character.
As an American, I am candidly more caught up in the constitutional crises buffeting my own country. I note with pleasure this day that the Department of Justice has decided to appeal the order of the Trump-appointed federal judge that essentially hamstrung the departments investigation of Trump’s astonishing - and completely unlawful - retention of White House records - many of them highly classified. But I know that the appeal may not succeed in the Trump-dominated 11th circuit, or in the hopelessly right wing Supreme Court. President Biden may have no choice but to use extraconstitutional means to defend the Constitution itself. However, that is the topic of another blog post.
Still, for all the constitutional crises besetting my own country, I can still take a few minutes to mourn, in my American way, the passing of woman whose not only Britain’s Queen, not only the Queen of the Commonwealth Realms, but in a way our Queen, too. For The Queen showed us, across 96 years, some fundamental truths about character, about forbearance, about perseverance, and about bearing up under great and terrible pressure and hardships. In a time in which we seek the soothing balm of scandal to assure ourselves that those horrible elites are “just like us,” The Queen was having none of it.
There were, to be sure, certain “scandals” during her reign. Yet, most of those “scandals” involved her children or the institution of the monarchy itself. Across the 96 years of her life and the 70 years of her reign, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary herself gave the chattering classes very little “scandal” to chatter about. Indeed, even the scandals surrounding her children or her grandchildren have been largely the kind of familial issues which we Americans ought to be loath to point fingers at, particularly given the enthusiastic manner in which millions of Americans uncritically and unhesitatingly supported that porcine prick Donald Trump.
Indeed, perhaps the only American President in recent years who could compare in terms of personal rectitude to Her Majesty the Queen was the man upon whom Donald Trump opened the vials of his petty wrath and hatred, Barack Obama. President Obama, by comparison with Donald Trump, President George Dubya Bush, or even President Bill Clinton, was a man of unimpeachable, unquestionable, unalloyed decency. So too, during her 70 years as Queen was Elizabeth II.
She was to many of us, on both sides of the Pond, especially during the 21st century, what we in much of the American West might call an abuela, a kind of grandmother after a fashion. Someone who could be formidable, someone who could throw a chancla in private to discipline a wayward child, but also someone who could be loving, affectionate, and above all, or rock of stability in her family and to her nation.
Today, many families and many nations mourn her passing. Indeed, the majority of Britain’s population, and the majority of the world’s population, has never known another British monarch. With her passes the last great leader of the Greatest Generation. With her also passes the first British monarch who could, and who did, do so much to heal the deep, theretofore unbridgeable divide between Great Britain and Ireland. I particularly mourn her for what she did to help make peace between two island peoples so inseparably joined by propinquity and yet so joined and so rent asunder at the same time by history. By traveling to Ireland, the first British monarch to do so since before the Republic was proclaimed, and by a simple act of respectful remembrance at the memorial to the Irishmen and Irishwomen who were lost during the independence struggle, Elizabeth II helped ring down the curtain on 700 years of Anglo-Irish feud. As the Irish might say, Herself did good.
It was Elizabeth II’s fate to preside over the recessional of the British Empire. During her reign Britain has gone from being sovereign over a quarter of the surface of the planet, On which "the sun never set," to being the small “European” country she was during the reign of Her Majesty's namesake Elizabeth I. Yet, that recessional of the British Empire has been accomplished largely without bloodshed, and largely civilly and with good feeling on both sides. Indeed, Britain, under Elizabeth II, has taught the rest of the world the art of gracious Imperial withdrawal.
Very few countries have learned that lesson well. Indeed, even Great Britain has not managed it with entire freedom from “acrimonious divorce,” from time to time. The withdrawal from Aden is a particular example. Yet, when all is said and done, one of the hallmarks of Elizabeth II’s reign is the relatively peaceful disestablishment of the British Empire, and its replacement with the Commonwealth of Nations, which has succeeded well enough that it now includes countries which were never part of the British Empire to begin with.
Of course, nostalgia for the British Empire or for any Empire is a dangerous thing, as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin may be learning with his foolish war in Ukraine. You cannot rebuild an Empire; the tides of history and the anger of oppressed peoples, such as the people of Ukraine, will inevitably militate against such an effort. Elizabeth II and each of the 15 men and women who served as her Prime Ministers, understood that reality. Yet, Elizabeth II and the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, understood that there were times when the British lion still had to roar.
When Leopoldo Galtieri and the other members of the Argentine junta tried to recoup their failing popularity by invading the Falklands in April, 1982, they expected the British response to take the form of a pro forma, tepid protest in the United Nations (which the Argentines confidently expected the Soviet Union to veto) and a few toothless economic sanctions which would in due course expire. They also expected support from the Reagan Administration in the United States.
Instead, what they got was what Newsweek magazine not inaptly described on a cover depicting the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes sailing down the Atlantic: “The Empire Strikes Back.” In 100 days of naval, air, and ground combat, Her Majesty’s Government won a decisive military victory, set in motion a train of events that led to the overthrow of the Argentine junta, and, in the words of Admiral Sir John Woodward, the overall British Falklands commander, fired a shot across the bow of Moscow and Beijing that the mettle of the West was still powerfully extant.
The British response in the Falklands and the American invasion of Grenada the following year did indeed send a message to Moscow and to Beijing that the West was quite prepared to fight. Indeed, the events at Port Stanley may have helped set in train the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yet, when British control was restored in Falkland Islands, the British field commander sent this message, this very traditional message, back to HMG: “the Falkland Islands are once again under the form of government desired by their inhabitants.
God Save the Queen.”
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen!
O Lord our God arise,
Scatter our enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!
Not in this land alone,
But be God’s mercies known,
From shore to shore!
Lord make the nations see,
That men should brothers be,
And form one family,
The wide world o’er.
From every latent foe,
From the assassins blow,
God save the Queen!
O’er her thine arm extend,
For Britain’s sake defend,
Our mother, prince, and friend,
God save the Queen!
Thy choicest gifts in store,
On her be pleased to pour,
Long may she reign!
May she defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the Queen!
Rest eternal grant to her, O Lord, may light perpetual shine on her, may her soul and the souls of all the departed, through the Mercy of God, rest in peace, and may they rise again in Glory at the Last Day, through Christ our Lord, Amen.
And now with our world in syncope, we may say God Save King Charles III.
