The Debatable Land #28: Queen Elizabeth II, 1926-2022

An era ends and everything henceforth will be strangely, subtly, different.

Monarchy is not rational. That is its point, for people are not wholly rational creations either. In the modern world, a constitutional monarchy risks seeming thoroughly anachronistic. Yet, perversely, perhaps that is what lends it at least some portion of the authority upon which it depends for its survival. It is a thread - a golden one, perhaps - stretching back to all our yesterdays, offering a sense of continuity all the more valuable for typically existing in the background. A presence that is reassuring precisely because it rarely needs to be contemplated at all, humming along as the background noise to a nation’s story. 

And so this is a strange, oddly unsettling moment and many people, I wager, are surprised by the extent to which they are moved by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. For most of us, she has always been there; a head of state whose presence underpinned the fabric of the nation. If we are honest, this presence was often dull but that served only to increase its val…