Is Your Enchanted Glass Half Full?

Is this the beginning or the end? asks Cailean Gallagher.

Nobody seemed prepared for the death of the queen. As my number five bus passed the Balmoral hotel in the drizzle about an hour after the Palace’s announcement, I looked up at the flagpole expecting to see a union flag at half-mast. A saltire still fluttered in the rain, defiantly indifferent.

The BBC’s rolling coverage of the royal family gathering at Balmoral featured nothing but blurry shots of royals in cars and helicopters, and royal correspondents exchanging platitudes. It did not seem like the scripts had been properly rehearsed for the end of Elizabethan Britain.

This weekend, of course, every flag on every flagpole is flying at half-mast. The producers have unspooled their pre-recorded interviews. Journalists have turned their attention from energy to elegies. The public is lapping up the symphony of poignant memories and paeans to Elizabeth’s glory, a perfect catharsis for a country that has been getting good at repressing its downturn gloom. 

The Crown is an orchestra of symbols. When Elizabeth became queen, her designation as the second of Britain (rather than as the second of England and first of Scotland) was meant to emblemise the British union. The fact she died at Balmoral will likewise help to symbolise the kingdom’s unity. Elizabeth II died in Scotland, and Charles III became king in Scotland. But he might find it harder than his mother to represent the union of crowns. He takes the throne at a time when the sovereignty of the queen-or-king-in-parliament is no longer assumed across the islands, but has to be asserted. 

The great fear of royalists, of course, is that Elizabeth’s death will change the way that people see the crown. Until Charles’s royal personality is established or created, it is much easier to think of the monarch not as a character but as a convention. Any gap in the proceedings might create a vacuum that can be filled by other claims of sovereignty; say, for instance, the sovereign claim of the people.

So the death of a monarch is a dangerous moment. Although the heir is ready to assume her mantle, the death of the Queen draws attention to the fact that for a moment, suddenly, sovereignty can just stop. This is why the official Palace statement referred to the life of the king immediately after mentioning the death of the queen. ‘The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and the Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral’. The sovereign is dead: long live the sovereign.

The continuity of the sovereign crown is a mystical process. The medieval idea that the monarch never dies is familiar to many a history undergraduate from Ernst Kantarowicz’s study, The King’s Two Bodies. The royal ‘body natural’, which can die, is distinct from the royal ‘body politic’, which can never age, decline, or perish, and passes to another body natural the instant its old one expires.

Nevertheless, the human characters who wear the crown are mortal, and they define the eras of the state. This is another reason why the death of a Queen is so important: it turns last Thursday into a big historical bookend. Already, BBC pundits are encouraging the public to think about this as the ‘second Elizabethan age’. Scottish historian Tom Nairn famously describes the British monarchy as ‘an enchanted glass’. The public see it through the distorting mirrors of the media, which emphasise some features, conceal others, and very often represent it in ways that bend historical truth. 

After all, this was not Scotland’s second Elizabethan age. Our latest Queen was named after an English sovereign who planned the death of Scotland’s monarch. Elizabeth I then prepared the groundwork for the union of the Scottish and the English crowns within one royal body. Britain’s monarchs have embodied this union ever since, and none more carefully than her lately departed namesake. Between the two Elizabeths, Great Britain’s monarchs have kept the people in awe.

Despite appearances, monarchs know how vulnerable their crown can be, and some have expressed their fears more explicitly than others. There is an apocryphal story that James V of Scotland, as he lay dying in Falkland Palace in 1542, pronounced as his last words: ‘It cam wi a lass an it will gang wi a lass.’ What these words meant was that, just as the Stewarts had come to power through marrying a princess, the line would end with his daughter as Queen. He was half right. Mary, Queen of Scots, the first Scottish queen, was the last Stuart to keep the crown of Scotland independent and intact.

As the Queen lay in her palace bed this week, I suspect that she had long been preparing for her death. I wonder what final words she chose. Maybe, just maybe, while her heirs, bloodline and other relatives waited gravely in a lounge or lobby, her quiet words to private friends would echo the fear that had haunted James in Falkland about the fate of his family and integrity of their kingdom.

‘It came with a Liz,’ she might have said in her last royal whisper, ‘and it will go with a Liz’.  

Image credit: Andy Warhol