Queen's Dead

by Chris C. Hawkins

Princess Elizabeth writing at her desk in Windsor Castle, 1944

The Queen is dead.

Feels weird, doesn’t it? Slightly surreal. Like her or loathe her, the woman’s been a constant figure of British life for the last 70 years. A fair chunk of us in the UK have never known any other monarch. She’s always just kind of been there. Lots of us have been speculating on what this day would be like for a while and increasingly anticipating it over the last year or so.

Now that it’s here?

I don’t know. It just feels peculiarly unreal. And it’s only going to get stranger. The country is about to lose its collective mind as we enter the convoluted national mourning period. The BBC in particular is going to be utterly insufferable for a good month. The Daily Mail and Express will find some way to blame the Queen’s death on Harry & Meghan, and/or The Labour Party. I think there was previously talk of the BBC suspending all comedy for 12 days which will really help lift the nation’s spirits. There’ll be a tremendous amount of ‘mourning’ that’s really just posturing but that’s part and parcel of having a constitutional system based around your citizens having a sycophantic parasocial relationship with an unelected hereditary head of state and their family.

If my maths is right then we should have a state funeral in about 10 days. The Queen will do a bit of Lying in State before so people can gawp at her corpse, but the whole thing will have been planned out meticulously for years now. The Queen probably planned most of it herself. But even after the funeral is over, I imagine the UK will still be under an obligatory sombre mood for some time.

The Queen has, for the most part, been a relatively inoffensive monarch. She’s not blameless. She’s pushed the boundaries of constitutional monarchy a little bit sometimes to influence certain policy so it maintains her own financial interests. And her own rigid adherence to protocol and tradition (or at least her unwillingness to challenge her advisors and courtiers on it) has probably contributed to the miserable marriages of many of her family. But on the whole, she’s slogged along doing a job she didn’t ask for 70 decades and you have to at least give her kudos for not becoming as big of a monster as she could have been with that.

And it’s sad when anyone dies. At least for somebody somewhere.

The big question is, how long do we have to wait before it’s no longer “inappropriate” or “too soon” to talk about ditching the Monarchy? Monarchy, particularly in the way Britain does it, is an outdated, archaic system that has no real tangible benefits anymore. It’s a relic of a past we should still look back on with interest and engagement but not keep dragging by its shoeless feet into the halls of modernity. The popularity and general good attitude of The Queen have been really the last excuses we had to keep it around. Entering the reign of King Charles III (yes, we have a King now - ew), I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the last passing of the crown we witness.

But that’s speculation on the future. As to what we know now:

The Queen is dead.

Long live the King, I guess.