Elizabeth II Was Queen of Our Times

It was April 8, 2005, the funeral of Pope

John Paul II.

The Vatican had been taken aback by the public response. He’d been pontiff 27 years and sick at least the last five. The Vatican thought he was old news. Yet Rome was engulfed by millions of people when news of his death came. They slept in the streets. They took up the chant that had spread: Santo subito—“make him a saint.” Which, nine years later, they did.

They carried his plain cypress coffin down the steps of St. Peters Basilica for the crowds to see, and placed it in St. Peter’s Square for the funeral Mass. On the coffin they placed a big ceremonial Book of the Gospels, open at the middle. As the funeral progressed a brisk breeze came up, and the breeze lifted the big pages, and they turned, one after another, as if by an invisible hand. At some point during the Mass the wind blew the book closed and moved it slightly, but the book stayed on the coffin. On C-Span, Archbishop

John Foley

said the same thing had happened 27 years before at the funeral of John Paul I. Rewatching that coverage this week I couldn’t figure out if he was saying “that’s interesting” or “again the wind cooperates with the media-savvy strategists of the Catholic church.” But watching it on television, many of us experienced it as a small public miracle.

Thursday morning the line to see the queen at the Palace of Westminster stretched more than 5 miles. People tried to explain to reporters why they were there. To take part in history, they said. To acknowledge history. To see something you may never see again. To show respect and to do it all together, as a people. To honor goodness, for she was a good woman and everybody knew. To say thank you.

I think too they see the page turning, time passing, our time with all its facts, symbols and fixed points. She was there, as the repository of 1,000 years of history, from the London blitz through the great pandemic. Now there will be new fixed points, a new king. Whose presence implies that history continues—the page turns but the book stays, whether it be of faith or history or both.

It’s said the British do this sort of thing better than anyone but the Vatican, and it’s true. The pomp and circumstance of the processions, the lords and ladies, the military regiments in all their distinctive regalia, is a nation telling its story to itself. It’s a people talking to itself about the passage and meaning of time.

On Monday the anchors of the great networks will talk about the emotions of the event, in keeping with the age, which is an emotional one and more responsive to pictures than the written or even spoken word. I hope they are highly specific and have a sense of history: “See that banner? It flew on a hill in Crimea during the Charge of the Light Brigade.”

This would be specificity in service of mere historical romanticism. But I haven’t noticed there’s too much historical romanticism running around and needing to be subdued, have you? And how will children want to enter history without it? Why would you, unless you thought you could be part of something grand?

The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, in their plumed black hats, accompanied the queen’s coffin this week. The Grenadier Guards were in the procession too. Eighty years ago, during World War II, Princess Elizabeth became their honorary colonel. The Life Guards in their gold helmets and spike—two squadrons of them fought with Wellington at the Peninsular War. They led a charge at Waterloo.

The Royal Marines were among the last to leave Gallipoli in 1915. They were in the Falklands too, and the Gulf War, and Afghanistan.

The Scots Guards? The 15th Lord Lovat of Scotland joined them as a young man and later fought in World War II.

Winston Churchill

once called him the handsomest man who ever slit a throat. During the second world war he was in an army special service brigade, in the thick of the fighting at Sword Beach, in the Normandy invasion. He and others, including

Bill Millin

of the No. 4 Commando unit, raced to relieve British troops pinned down at the Pegasus bridge. He was a piper, and suddenly the men at the bridge heard the sound of his bagpipes. They thought they were dreaming. But it was Millin, cheering on the reinforcements, on the order of Lord Lovat, who, when he fought his way to the bridge, said, “Sorry, I’m a few minutes late,” as if he’d been in a traffic jam.

Cornelius Ryan

told the story in “The Longest Day.”

Ronald Reagan

loved to tell it.

The Blues and Royals will be there. Parts of their regiment were formed on order of

Oliver Cromwell.

The Coldstream Guards fought from the English Civil War to Napoleon, from the Crimean War through Iraq. Their motto: “Second to none.”

The Irish Guards will be there, formed by Queen Victoria in 1900. She had been moved by the valor of the Irish troops in the Boer War, and the lore is that an officer asked the sovereign if the Irish regiments in the British army could wear the shamrock on their helmets on St. Patrick’s Day. She could do better than that, she said. In World War I the Guards were in the bloody battle of Passchendaele, where two of its members won the Victoria Cross in one day.

Rudyard Kipling’s

son, John, died with the Guards in the Battle of Loos. Kipling later wrote a poem about them: “We’re not so old in the Army List / But we’re not so new in the ring.”

The history of a country isn’t only a history of its fighting, or shouldn’t be. And there were all the wars and battles of wicked imperialism, too. The point is to know all the stories, to keep them alive in human memory. It’s not all just water under the bridge, it’s not just something that happened, it’s part of who you are, who you’ve been, what you imbibed and got inside you.

It’s not bad to tell the story, to put it out there for the world to see, and you to see. So I see the wisdom of the crowds in London. They’re saying: Respect the past, and respect your own memory. A 70-year reign contains signposts not only of your life but the life of your times. This one includes the story of a shy little girl who became a queen, and a good one, who adorned her age.