Her subsequent joy that the Scots narrowly rejected independence in the 2014 referendum also became public. Even the grant of devolved autonomy to Scotland and Wales in 1999, which gave each its own national Parliament with limited powers, was known to worry her. And with the Queen’s departure, the fissures papered over by this mystification of an overarching British identity are bound to widen.ĭuring the latter part of her reign, Elizabeth was unable to hide her anxiety over the growing movement for Scottish independence. The Crown itself has helped disguise an often overbearing Englishness as British. But to many Scottish or Welsh people, England, Scotland, and Wales are the nations, and the U.K. With her passing, the deepest-laid question is exposed: What is Britain?Įlizabeth II kept Britain going, in the sense that English people, who comprise roughly 80 percent of Britain’s population, looked into her mirror and saw a multiple United Kingdom, a nation whose “family” (to use her word) reached across distant continents and oceans. This soothing story has kept her people comforting themselves in that false reflection. But the Queen projected a calm assurance that nothing had really changed, that Britain was still the same world-leading, stable old country that had emerged after the defeat of Hitler. That enchanted glass has turned out to be a distorting mirror. The second Elizabeth had to sit and watch Great Britain diminish in the world, as its colonies struggled to their feet and marched off to independence. The first Elizabeth had launched English colonists and conquerors across the oceans.
That was what the British were encouraged to see in 1952, when this beguiling young woman ascended to the throne and a “new Elizabethan age” was proclaimed. Read: No one performed Britishness better than Her Majesty As the Scottish philosopher Tom Nairn has written, she has been an “enchanted glass,” a mirror in which her subjects see themselves reflected as united, brave, and kindly, loved and respected by the giant spread of the outside world that was once the empire and is now the Commonwealth. Up to a third of the British population (including anti-monarchists) has confessed to dreaming about her typically, she drops in for a cup of tea to ask you-such a relief to be talking to a normal, sensible person!-what to do about her children or her savings or her garden. Instead, she invaded and colonized imaginations.
She traveled indefatigably, smiling and encouraging, but unlike most of her forebears, she sought no political agency. And they ask themselves: Are we the same people? But today her subjects look around and admit that, in reality, almost everything had been changing all through her reign. The Queen and her kingdom were pictured as almost unchanging through those 70 years on the throne. This carpet of continuity led all the way back to the Second World War, to the foundation myth of modern Britain, when “we stood alone” against fascism. But when it came, they felt only a slow, numbing sadness, and fear.Įlizabeth II’s life and reign had formed a sort of weatherproof awning, sheltering a long carpet of years. Before the announcement, nobody could imagine-wanted to imagine-quite how they would feel. Rain fell, cold and heavy, on Londoners gathering with umbrellas outside Buckingham Palace.
The media uncorked a day-and-night flow of solemn eulogy and familiar images. And within 48 hours, she was dead.Ī huge and complex contraption of official mourning, rehearsed to exhaustion over the past 15 years, lurched into action. Leaning on a stick, she managed a smile last week as she invited Liz Truss, Britain’s new prime minister, to form a government. The ancient and beloved Queen, who had reigned much longer than most of her subjects had lived, was 96 and visibly failing.
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