Herbert Howells’ anthem for the late Queen’s Coronation in 1953: music that has been much in mind these past few days. ‘Behold, O God, our defender, and look upon the face of thine anointed. For one day in thy courts is better than a thousand.’ (Psalm 84)
It is remarkable: Britain has rediscovered solemnity. Amid my grief — and it certainly has been grief, with the immovable knot of dread in the gut, the catch in the heart, the oblique recurring waves of disbelief — there is a deep well of consolation in seeing the dignified, fond farewell that we are giving our beloved Queen.
Of course, plenty of people are carrying on more or less as normal — loud phone conversations on trains, and so on — and conversations with friends and colleagues have revealed that not everyone is feeling particularly bereaved — several have admitted as much. Some try to find something humorous to say, while others, perhaps wary of the ambush of sorrow, say breezily, ‘Well, it’s all part of history.’ Maybe at moments like these it has always been so: not everyone sees things in the same way and, after all, feelings cannot be forced. But to me there is a real change in the air.
For instance, there was the sight of the flowers in Green Park on Sunday, the aisles and aisles of them under the September-heavy trees. At first, as I wandered up and down them, my thoughts snagged on a mild anxiety that this might all be a little too sentimental, a little too much about us and not enough about the Queen, but then I saw the volunteers, going steadily through the flowers to remove the plastic wrapping — the sort of unglamorous but necessary task that the Queen herself would have noticed and admired — and was reassured. I made my way up the Mall, past St. James’ Palace from whose window-sills the new King had been proclaimed the previous day, caught the conclusion of the Changing of the Guard at Horse Guards Parade, cut through into Whitehall, went on across Parliament Square and down Millbank, over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge, and ultimately to a beautifully said and sung Requiem Mass at St. George’s Cathedral. I signed the condolence book there which had been carefully laid out.
This change in the air is a reassurance and a consolation. Whereas normally, and above all in the pandemic ‘lockdowns’, we have had row after row of identical days like the cells of a blank spreadsheet, these days are heavy with meaning. That weight tells us that we are right to mourn and to grieve, and to miss the Queen; that we are not being silly or over-sensitive in our sorrow. Dignity and reverence and solemnity have returned, and for the right reasons. (The sole mistake so far has been the decision to bring the Queen’s coffin to London by air, rather than by rail as was the original plan.) Even the screens that usually flicker their deranging advertisements at us now display still pictures of the late Queen with a sober message of condolence.
And then there was yesterday’s cortège, the slow drum-beat, the polished sombre brass, the thud of the guns and Big Ben tolling once every minute. We of the smartphone generation, the children of the Internet Age, saw the coffin borne in sorrowful dutiful stateliness to the Palace of Westminster. And in Westminster Hall, where for now she lies in state, how fitting it all is, how right. How rich all the colours are, so deep that they can be felt imbuing themselves into the memory. They are as rich and deep as our grief: the thick warm yellow translucence of the candle-wax, the scarlet and gold of the furled standard, the clean stone, the purple-shrouded catafalque.
The BBC’s live stream of the vigil in Westminster Hall is, though a little intrusively zoomed-in on occasions, very moving to watch. How strangely beautiful is the grief in the faces of the mourner-pilgrims who have waited many hours to pause, or to bow, or to make the sign of the Cross, or to salute, or even to blow a kiss.
The Queen has ‘surprised a hunger in ourselves to be more serious’ — and this, I think, is the first, immediate example of the way in which her life continues, and will continue, to bear fruit for us. This is how it works, the life of faith: light catches light, heart speaks unto heart. Those of us who shared or sympathised with her hopes and beliefs now feel the burden of responsibility falling on us, the duty to be little bolder in standing up for those beliefs, and living by them.
Part of our duty to the late Queen is, of course, giving the new King the acclamation he deserves. And so we have, with such wonderful sonorous language — ‘Whereas it has pleased God to call to Himself our late Sovereign Lady Elizabeth of happy memory…’
I feel strangely at home in these otherworldly days of sorrow. This is a deeply sad parting, a real wrench, and it is hard not to worry about the future — I am trying not to think about the loneliness which may well sweep in again after the funeral, that sense of an autumn of many things — but, as Joanna Bogle has pointed out, this is fundamentally not a horrible grief, as one feels after an outrage or a tragedy — it is a gentle farewell, mingled with deep gratitude and with confidence that the Lord whom our Queen served so well will say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ and receive her at last into Heaven. And since, after all, as Her late Majesty herself told us, ‘grief is the price we pay for love’, it is only fair that I should settle my account. So, strange to say, thanks be to God for this moment of togetherness in grief and love, and for all His bittersweet blessings.
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