JUST PLAIN TACKY: The Postmortem Vilification of Queen Elizabeth II

Summary: The postmortem vilification of Her Late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, has come from a variety of sources. Some of them are predictable; the stridency of so-called anti-monarchists and “socialists” was perhaps to be predicted. So, too, were many of the angry denunciations that streamed in from Africa, South Asia, and even from the Caribbean. What was less tolerable were the maledictions and vilifications from a great many voices in the United States. Some of them had simply never got over the disdain for George III that is part of most American’s DNA, but which most of us have managed to overcome. Others vilified the memory of the Queen because of some kind of “Pro-native,” anti-colonialist anger that has apparently been simmering for years. Either way, not one of the angry vilificators of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, Mountbatten-Windsor, neé Windsor seems to have taken the first fragment of a moment to consider –or to have any compassion for– the very real grief of the nearly 68 million people of the United Kingdom who have lost the only sovereign the majority of them had ever known.

Cathedral City, September 14, 2022 – the vilification of Elizabeth II began while her body was still warm and still resting where she had died, at Balmoral in the Scots Highlands. It took various forms and came from various sources. Some, native to the United Kingdom, called themselves anti-monarchists, “socialists,” “anti-Royalists,” or, simply, anarchists. Their vilification of the memory of the Queen who had been Britain’s sovereign for 70 years took such churlish, childish, forms as painting the words “parasite” or even “whore” on statues of the late monarch.

Of course, that kind of vilification is adolescent, even infantile. Graffiti, after all, can be painted over. But other denunciation, evidently prepared and written while the Queen was still alive, was more hurtful because it was committed to legacy and social media, much of it by writers of whom many of us had thought much better than that they would lend themselves to so unseemly an enterprise.

Most of these denunciations as their starting point the inescapable fact of the Queen’s death. From there, they almost inevitably descended to a catalog of all the evils, real, imagined, or fictionalized, of the British Empire over the centuries. From there, most of these vilification pieces would include nonspecific examples of what those awful British people did. Whippings, burnings, beatings, castrations, and other various happenings were all blamed on the Queen, personally, as if she had been present at every one of these alleged enormities, and that she had committed each and every one of them, laughing as she did so.

Now is true that the British Empire, like every Empire throughout world history, has many transgressions for which it must render account. But by comparison with the enormities of relatively contemporary colonial empires, the record for Britain is fairly milquetoast. The record of the Belgians in Africa, for example, cannot bear examination. The Republican Empire of France was guilty of terrible wrongs in Africa and in Southeast Asia. The Italians in Eritrea and Libya had to leave because World War II forced the dismantlement of their corrupt colonial empire. The record of the Dutch in the East Indies, of the French in Africa and in Southeast Asia, of the Portuguese in Brazil, Mozambique, and Angola, of the Spanish in the Philippines and in the Caribbean, of the Japanese during their brief period as an imperial power, and even the record of the Russians and Soviets in their Empire -particularly in Ukraine- makes the British record look pale.

Nor should we Americans be wagging fingers at the mother country. Our record with our own indigenous peoples is awash with the blood of our Indian tribes. Thus, those who seek to vilify the memory of her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II ought to take a close look at their own history. In equity, there is a principle that “he who comes into equity must come with clean hands.” Who, then, are we to demand that the British people should now grovel and apologize to other peoples, whose records may be be equally, if not more, tarnished? That includes, but is by no means limited to, the records of white colonizers, of native conquerors, and of indigenous grabbers of other people’s territory.

For while it may be fashionable in some quarters to vilify the memory of the late Queen, there are a couple of facts which cannot be gainsaid. Unlike the Belgians, the French, the Italians, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Japanese, Britain managed to divest yourself of her empire with a surprising degree of nonviolent grace. Though the United States and Aden required wars of national liberation before the British were induced to depart, the pattern of British imperial leavetaking was originally developed in 1947 with the grant of independence to India and to Pakistan, and continued ten years later, under Elizabeth II, with the grant of independence to Ghana. After that, Britain steadily divested itself of its empire largely free from the kind of colonial wars that had bedeviled the Dutch in the East Indies, the French, whose defeat at Dien Bien Phu shocked all of Europe and precipitated the fall of the Fourth French Republic, the Portuguese, whose ultimate defeat in Mozambique and in Angola led to the fall of Salazar’s so-called Estado Novo in Portugal, the Spanish, whose monarchy never quite recovered from the Spanish-American War, and the Japanese, whose hopes of Empire vanished in the bright atomic sunlight of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But, while the other imperial powers tried to hold on to their empires, at great peril to themselves, Britain, which under King George VI had won a victory in World War II at such a “dear price,” as Winston Churchill put it “as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat,” had the good sense to realize that it was better to let the Empire go gracefully, and to try to create in its place a Commonwealth of Nations wherein the former colonies of the Empire might still find some degree of common ground, and some degree of shared values.

For the most part, the British plan has come fairly well to fruition. The Commonwealth continues to endure, even if a number of Commonwealth countries, starting with India in 1950, have opted to become “Republics Within the Commonwealth.” Even countries which had not been part of the British Empire, such as Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon, and Togo, has become members of the Commonwealth. Moreover, the Commonwealth accommodates both Commonwealth realms which acknowledge the monarchy of Charles III, other realms within the Commonwealth under their own monarchs, and the aforementioned Republics within the Commonwealth. In short, the Commonwealth has managed to make the transition from the British Empire to a Commonwealth of states which may or may not have had a traditional connection to the British Empire with not inconsiderable success.

Much of this was due to the character of the Queen herself. Elizabeth knew from young age that she would be the sovereign of the British Empire. Yet, she also knew that hers was a ceremonial sovereignty, in which she possessed what Walter Bagehot referred to as the residual rights of the British monarch, “the right to advise, to be consulted, and to warn,” as long as she did so discreetly, privately, and in a fashion that was within the bounds of Britain’s peculiar unwritten Constitution. Across the 70 years in her reign, Elizabeth fulfilled her function. And she did so with grace, with humility, and when the occasion demanded, with dry, wickedly funny humor.

She also was buttressed in fulfilling her constitutional functions by her husband, the sometimes prickly but ever-dependable Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. His death in 2021, knocked a significant prop out from under the Queen. While under one of Henry VIII’s Various Treason Acts, it is treason to discuss the death of the monarch, speculation as to Elizabeth’s inevitable passing became more of a “thing,” during the last year and a half.

Yet, unlike the somewhat austere Philip, Elizabeth had become what the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea referred to as “Mama Queen,” a grandmother, an abuela, as we say in the American southwest and in California. And when the person to whom the king referred as his “dearest mama,” the grandmotherly figure who had been the monarch so long that most of the 68 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom could remember no other sovereign, it is perhaps understandable that there would be a wave of nationwide morning and worldwide grief. Even in the United States, where Elizabeth was “our” Queen in that way that citizens of a republic often take a beloved monarch into their own hearts, we sense a loss, and feel real grief, notwithstanding what various “woke” anti-Royalists, anti-monarchists” self-proclaimed Socialists and Communists, and those who imagine that they cannot proclaim their solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world without unloading the vials of wrath upon this dutiful woman may think.

So, despite the criticisms of the “woke” brigade, who have, apparently, no sense of empathy, no sense of respect for others’ grief, and no regard for humor or optics, most of us will ignore the angry ones, but we will remember their uncouth behavior in the future, because it's just plain tacky.

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Paul S. Marchand is an Irish-American lawyer, with a culturally French name, who lives in Cathedral City and works in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is not, to borrow the words of the English actress Helen Mirren, a pro-royalist, but like Ms. Mirren, he is a pro-Queenist. He will give King Charles III benefit of a lot of doubt, however. And like many other Americans, he will fly the flag at half staff until Her Majesty is interred, for like many other Americans, he, too, mourns the passing of an extraordinary human being.