The death of Queen Elizabeth II will surely be measured in superlatives. The length of her reign, the affection in which she was held, and the influence she exercised not only in the United Kingdom but throughout the world are the most obvious areas that will command near-universal gratitude. The facts are well known and have been celebrated annually as they ticked over in a steady accumulation; no other British monarch has reigned for longer.
In world history only Louis XIV surpassed her, having succeeded as little more than a babe-in-arms. The significance of the late Queen’s reign, however, is as substantial as the measurement of its longevity and her popularity. Historians may well use the date of her death as the measure of the end of an era, but not just as part of a cycle succeeding the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian periods. The second Elizabethan age will be seen to have closed in conjunction with the fall of a culture and perhaps even a civilisation.
When the Queen came to the throne in 1952 her country, with much of the rest of Europe and the global west, was self-evidently Christian in its public life. At a time of impending crisis in 1940 her father, King George VI, had successfully called for a National Day of Prayer in response to the threatened destruction of the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France. Her coronation was exclusively and wholly Christian—Anglican, even—at a time when baptisms and marriages in church were still the social norm.
Despite the attendance of many individual Catholics at the Coronation, not least the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal, there was no formal ecclesiastical presence in Westminster Abbey because in 1953 the old rules relating to attendance at non-Catholic worship still applied. Nevertheless the former Princess Elizabeth had been received by Pius XII in the days when the Vatican was still essentially a medieval court; she later met every pope of her reign except John Paul I, and her visit to his successor in 1980 was the first state visit to the Vatican by a British monarch. It marked the formal beginnings of glasnost, four centuries after Pius V had tried to overthrow her namesake.
In the course of that visit she invited John Paul II to pay a pastoral visit “to the Roman Catholic community in Great Britain where some four million of my people are members of the Roman Catholic Church”. She told the pontiff that “We support the growing movement of unity between the Christian Churches throughout the world, and we pray that your Holiness’s visit to Britain may enable us all to see more clearly those truths which both unite and divide us in a new and constructive light.” She duly welcomed him to the UK in 1982; in 2010 she did the same for Benedict XVI.
Other monarchs have died with the Archbishop of Canterbury in attendance; because she was at Balmoral, the vagaries of the Act of Settlement of 1690 meant that she went to God as a Presbyterian. Both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland have changed unrecognisably in the last 70 years, and the much-vaunted introduction of women deacons, priests and bishops in the former and same-sex marriage in the latter has saved neither institution from the brink of collapse. Baptisms and marriages in the Church of England are now the exception, rather than the rule.
Women chaplains were a late addition to the Ecclesiastical Household; it was impossible to gauge the Queen’s personal views on the ordination of women, although she was rumoured to regret it. Addressing senior Anglican leaders gathered at the fractious Lambeth Conference in August, she calmly observed that “Throughout my life, the message and teachings of Christ have been my guide, and in them I find hope.” Nevertheless, a narrative that sustained a philosophy of life and with it the country’s culture—that there are objective moral values and that Jesus Christ is Lord—has been replaced by one of relativism and the widest possible choice of moral and existential values.
Classical stoicism and Christian duty has given way to personal gratification, consumerism and narcissism. The world in which she was born could hardly have been more different than that of which she took her leave. George VI was an Emperor—at least for the early part of her life—and she was the last surviving member of the Order of the Crown of India. She rarely wore it in later years, after she stopped wearing military uniform, preferring just the family orders of her father and grandfather. The old order had passed away, and if fell to her to secure the new. Succession and continuity were everything, and she realised that it was not to be taken for granted.
By the beginning of her reign the monarchy had won the hearts of the nation, having led by example during the vicissitudes of a war in which the fate of the country hung in the balance. By the end the public reputation of her son the Duke of York and the behaviour of her grandson the Duke of Sussex cast a long shadow. The breakdown of the present King’s first marriage echoed painfully in the lives of his children and her grandchildren; it not only caused her considerable distress, but also threatened to destabilise the foundation of the monarchy that her dutiful and mature self-giving had sustained.
From the stability of her own long and successful marriage to the late Duke of Edinburgh, whom she described as her “rock”, she had no choice but to preside over the most dramatic shift of cultural values. A society that was largely Christian became almost uniformly secular, and during the transition she exemplified the best virtues of the Christian faith. Not many of those who loved and respected her understood the source of her attraction. A commitment to leading a life dedicated to Christian moral virtue engenders the formation of personal attributes of selflessness, kindness, and devotion to duty imbued with faith, hope, and humour.
Perhaps she was at her best in her annual Christmas messages. In her formal role as leader of a national church at a moment of religious celebration, it was her duty to offer a public reflection and she was frequently an eloquent evangelist. At the same time this devoted and deeply committed Christian infused the formal proceedings with an authenticity of faith that was deeply effective. As the society over which she ruled constitutionally grew ever more heterodox and hedonistic, the dignity and integrity that she embodied both personally and constitutionally resonated with ever deeper value.
On Coronation Day she addressed her people, then still scattered all over the world, assuring them that “I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.” The mourning that will now accompany her death includes a very real grief for a remarkable woman: a treasured mother, a dignified grandmother and a much-loved Queen. It will also, surely, include sorrow for the passing of a culture whose deepest and most noble virtues she represented and embodied to her very core.
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