‘Go forth, O Christian soul…’

The queue for the Queen’s lying-in-state at the King’s Stairs Gardens, Bermondsey, roughly five miles from Westminster.  10.30 a.m., 17th September 2022. 

My final contribution to the Second Elizabethan Age was, as it turned out, to take half a dozen newly-catalogued manuscripts down to the store, slide them into fresh envelopes, fasten them with archival tape, label them, and put them ready for shelving.  I had seen the lunchtime announcement about the Queen’s health, and worried and prayed as I worked, actually rather glad there was no computer downstairs.  By the time I surfaced again, the news had broken: it was a colleague in Security, an ex-serviceman, who told me.  “If it hadn’t been for her, this country would have gone to the dogs years ago,” he said flatly.

The day afterwards, a friend of mine happened to be cataloguing a file of condolence letters received by an actor’s widow, and came across a nice phrase: ‘You can prepare your mind, but you cannot prepare your heart.’  We had known the day would come and dreaded it, but even I was slightly taken aback by the grief that took hold of me when it did.  As others have said, the Queen’s death was not a surprise — but it was a shock.

Yet the way it happened was in several respects fitting, and therefore already consoling.  Not until after the pandemic, and the great Platinum Jubilee, and even this summer of ferocious heat and the shocking beige of drought were over; only once welcome showers were sending some of the life and colour flowing back into Britain’s veins, so that our landscapes were beginning to look themselves again, did the moment arrive.  The Queen saw us through, and then she went home.

And from the ten days of mourning that followed, too — with a first autumnal bittersweetness in the air, with the tearful glory of rainbows in the skies, with torn ragged clouds trailing overhead at dusk like smoke, with the hard underframe of the national story to which we all belong suddenly only just below the surface — I shall remember not only sorrow, but deep consolation.  I mean not only the constitutional reassurances — the ancient mechanisms of the accession ceremony, swinging into motion like a pair of sombre oaken doors, just, I realise, as they would have done, if needed, on any other day between 1952 and 2022 — I mean something deeper: spiritual consolation.  The lying-in-state, for instance, was balm for the soul, even when seen on television: the solemnity, the simple formality, the reverence.  And it worked, for in filed, and kept filing, thousands upon thousands of mourners, their faces strangely beautiful with love and grief, passing reverently through Westminster Hall, curtseying or bowing or even crossing themselves.  The live-streamed television pictures of this procession, though at times zooming a little intrusively into people’s faces, must be one of the most moving broadcasts I have ever seen.

The queue down Shad Thames, just E. of Tower Bridge.

And the extraordinary lengths of the queues showed the extent of the grief and the love, even as the pictures showed their depth.  Seeing dire warnings of a twenty-two-hour-long wait on the Saturday morning, my sister and cousin and I initially abandoned our plans to join the queue, deciding instead that we would walk along its length, past the mourners, pay our respects outside Westminster Hall, and then perhaps go to see the flowers in Green Park.  But just as we reached the start of the queue at Southwark Park, it was reopened with an estimated length of a mere sixteen hours, and we changed our minds and queued after all.

It was, as many have noticed, a pilgrimage — starting, for us, under the dingy girders of South Bermondsey station, along past Galleywall Road, through Southwark Park and a first set of interminable zigzags into the queue, past the makeshift tea-stands set up by enterprising residents, snaking among converted warehouses and bridges and embankments and theatres, over Lambeth Bridge, until, after a further two hours shuffling concertina-wise up and down Victoria Gardens, and a jarring bag-search and body-scan, at last we slipped into the thick solemn hush of Westminster Hall, with the rich colours of the catafalque before us, and the priceless brilliance of the Imperial State Crown flashing finely at journey’s end.

Zigs and zags at Tower Bridge

The whole experience (which turned out to be eleven hours long, not sixteen) taught me something about pilgrimage: that it is the natural expression of gratitude.  I had, and have, no way of repaying the Queen for her years of faith, and integrity, and quiet constant example.  All I could offer was a mark of respect before her coffin.  Small recompense indeed — but there was subconscious logic at work; the knowledge that if this little gesture could somehow be made to cost me more — if I had had to stand in a queue six miles long in order to be able to make it — perhaps it would actually come to be worth more.  Rather like the widow’s mite in the Gospel, my little bow would take on a greater meaning, because I had ‘given all I had’.

The Lambeth Embankment, across the river from Parliament, as the afternoon wears on

This, I think, has something to do with why, when I had heard that the queuing time had nearly doubled, my initial reaction was not dismay, but a strange instinctive determination that I was Jolly Well going to queue, come what may.  This is surely the same impulse that drives people to walk barefoot and impose on themselves all sorts of hard, tough exigencies while on pilgrimage.  It is, however heartily we laugh and joke with our fellow pilgrims along the way, a serious, deep, even primal gesture of love.

The Palace of Westminster from Lambeth Bridge, with flag at half-mast

I think the same is true of the great marches and the funeral offices: as well as solemn duties, they were acts of love and gratitude.  How beautiful, then, that they healed us even as we undertook them.  How comforting, too, were the beautiful prayers of the Anglican liturgy, their loving poetic language, commending our Queen to our God, and telling us again and again what we needed to hear: that whereas we rightly grieve our Sovereign who ‘now rests in sleep’, we may nevertheless have confidence both that ‘we shall rise again at the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ’  —  and, furthermore, that ‘in due time, we may share with our sister that clearer vision when we shall see thy face.’  We are right to grieve, but it is not the end: again and again I drank in the medicine of those words.  One sensed the wisdom of ages in the knowledge that ten full days would be needed for the initial salving and bandaging of the wound, for that ‘gracious promise’ to sink in once again.  

The two-mile-long concertina in Victoria Gardens

“We will miss Queen Elizabeth terribly,” said Archbishop of Southwark, John Wilson, at a beautiful Requiem Mass at St. George’s Cathedral the following morning.  I have written at length elsewhere in these pages of my admiration for the Queen, and of how extraordinarily blessed we have been to have at the heart of our national life a person who placed love so clearly above power, and for so long, and with such constancy.  She may not have made her personal opinions known, but she did show her beliefs, and the response to her death, the outpouring of grief and love, shows that this did not go unnoticed.  And so, as that extraordinary and bittersweet month slides away off into the past, and as we who share those beliefs, shouldering our loads, turn to carry on without her, we may take slow-burning courage from this parting gift: the vindication in her death of the manner of her life.

Go forth upon thy journey from this world, O Christian soul;
In the name of God the Father Almighty who created thee;
In the name of Jesus Christ who suffered for thee;
In the name of the Holy Spirit who strengtheneth thee.
In communion with the blessèd saints,
and aided by Angels and Archangels,
and all the armies of the heavenly host,
may thy portion this day be in peace,
and thy dwelling in the heavenly Jerusalem.  Amen.

A still frame from the BBC’s live stream from Westminster Hall.