Elizabeth the Good

Sep 28, 2022 by Jill

by The Critic:

Death always seems unreal, for all that it is the starkest of realities. And never can the death of a stranger have seemed more real, yet unreal, to most of us than that of Elizabeth II. For how many of us look back on our own lifetimes without always seeing her there in the background too?

She was not a fairytale, however age-enchanted the ATS-uniformed young princess alongside Winston Churchill on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 1945 has long seemed to us. She was as real as anything that makes up the stuff of life. Thus we could be forgiven for loyally thinking that the Queen was permanent, beyond mortal constraint. But she has been called to what she knew to be her reward, and we make what we will of her life, the throne she sat on, and the service it meant.

We should be grateful that this Queen Elizabeth’s death and funeral did not suffer the distracting dirges that attached themselves to the previous Queen Elizabeth, her mother. Then, in the pomp of New Labour, the Queen Mother’s funeral was cast as a culture war of sorts, in which the ageing voices of threatened tradition sought to exert themselves — perhaps they feared it would be their last rearguard action — against the claims of Blairite progress and modernisation.

Read here

A contrary view on QE2 — an open letter to Archbishop Beach from Sri Lanka, Anglican Ink