Country salutes in final vigil
QUEEN Elizabeth has died, but she cannot yet rest in peace.
In service in death, as in life, she has embarked on another tour, her most grim, in departing Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
Here was her happy place, where she left her crown at the gates, to be a wife, mother and great grandmother, where she wore tartans and drove herself and washed the dishes and walked the dogs.
Queen Elizabeth had passed through the castle’s black and gold gates for the final time.
Her simple convoy was headed to Edinburgh, to “rest’, as the commentators put it, at the Palace of Holyrood House, for the first night of eight before she will, finally, be permanently farewelled in the most public and private of services.
Along that city’s Royal Mile, people stood a dozen or more deep, just for a glimpse. A lack of animation marked their vigil.
There was clapping, as her coffin passed. But the barking of a lone dog amplified the unusual lack of volume from such a large gathering.
There was pomp, naturally, in the neat symmetry of assembled tartan uniforms and the sight of the Queen’s children Anne, Andrew and Edward. They shared the grief – if not the eagle-eyed worldwide gaze – of all children who lose a parent (or, in their case, both parents within 17 months).
At Balmoral, locals had started turning up at dawn, to farewell an understated local about whom everyone seemed to have a personal tale in generosity and kindness.
A lone piper signalled the Queen’s exit before her convoy hit nearby Ballater, a village where almost every shop boasts a royal crest. Onlookers clasped their hands and bowed their heads after being discouraged from throwing flowers at the passing hearse.
They were farewelling a kindly neighbour who offered lifts to those who needed them, and who offered to intercede when flood insurance claims were going unanswered in 2015.
There were few histrionics. Lots of iPhones. Little applause, as if all carried the stoicism gene from highlander forebears. It appeared that the Queen was to be sent off with statue-like silence, though the crowds did loosen the collective mask when her hearse later passed through Dundee.
London, in contrast, promises something rowdier after the Queen arrives at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday. Here, the embrace of the new era, featuring impromptu walkabouts by King Charles, sits alongside a solemn salute to the old.
Buckingham Palace is already a no-go zone, a scrum of bodies not unlike Derby Day at Melbourne’s Flemington racecourse in those times before sanity – and crowd limits – prevailed.
In the Sunday sun, the streets from Trafalgar Square to Big Ben heaved, as if London was hosting the world’s most oversubscribed family outing.
Floral tributes spilt across nearby Green Park. Crowds bottle-necked at sets of wrought iron gates, heading to and from a cathedral of oaks, where autumnal leaves crunched underfoot and competing perfumes filled the air.
There was hardly a tear; rather, a hush of quiet reverence. Many here, amid the prams and dogs, were visiting from elsewhere, as if a kingdom was coming together by unspoken solidarity.
They couldn’t always express their reasons; some seemed put out that the question was even being asked – who needs words for the most natural of community urges?
The hordes – and their mannered approach which precluded jostling or impatience – couldn’t be categorised.
There were the very young, hanging off parents, but also the very elderly. The well-to-do appeared to be well represented, as did a working class that brought to mind singlets, footy shorts and sunburn of Aussie bloke in the 1970s.
They were as one. It wasn’t a choice to be here so much as a state of mind.
Some people spent hours wandering from one mushrooming tribute to the next. In one area, hundreds of floral posies were carefully arranged to spell: “ER Thank you”. If the wider floral messages told a story, it was a collective acknowledgment for decades of service.
There were few Union Jacks in the personal farewells; the only political tone, if there was one, lay in the dozens of messages speaking of the Queen’s empowerment of women.
The notes were largely handwritten by children, completed with drawings of corgis. They were not addressed to her job title.
Entire classrooms, from Bedfordshire to Wormholt Primary School, may have forfeited a day’s curriculum to create a single tribute. Their thoughts honoured a radiant presence who sounded like everyone’s grandma.
Many kids favoured the Queen’s signature image with Paddington Bear, depicting them hand-in-hand while walking away. “I’ve done my duties, Paddington, please take me to my husband,” a typed caption read.
These shows of loss are not unprecedented. National sentiment surged when the previous monarch, Elizabeth’s father, George VI, died so long ago.
He lay in state at Westminster Hall, where more than 300,000 people – stretching up to six kilometres – waited to pay their respects.
His was the first televised sendoff to a monarch (if without the helicopters of today), and it would be dwarfed by the sudden loss of Princess Diana a couple of generations later.
The shock and rawness for Di cannot be compared to today’s scenes. Trauma and numbness for her loss contrasts with the respect and reflection for her once motherin-law.
Yet Princess Di’s farewell, too, seems certain to be dwarfed by the Queen’s farewell tour, in moving shows of mass (and sometimes restrained) gratitude.