It’s harder to be a king than a queen
...especially in our modern, touchy-feely world, says royal biographer A.N. WILSON
WHEN interviewed, many people paying respect to Queen Elizabeth say it is as if they have lost their mum. Maybe such sentiments betray something very deep in the collective mentality – namely the fact that the British respond, instinctively and collectively, to having a female monarch.
It is a profound part of what it means to be human to revere the ideal of what is known as the Eternal Feminine, a phrase coined by one of Queen Victoria’s favourite poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The emotion draws upon our feelings about our own mothers – either about perfect mothers who were everything to us, or to those who were less than satisfactory.
Either way, we humans have always been drawn to goddesses, or to divine or semi-divine figures, who channel our needs for an Eternal Feminine.
This was something Queen Elizabeth I exploited to the utmost. In her famous oration after learning that the Spanish Armada had been defeated, she said: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.’ The British
‘Men struggle to call upon the deep response evoked by women leaders’
‘We are now supposedly more female than our forebears’
nation would have to wait hundreds of years, until Winston Churchill delivered his great wireless broadcasts during the Second World War, before it heard such rhetoric.
And whereas Churchill made no reference to his body or his gender, Elizabeth thrillingly did.
Her reign was a period of history when the UK emerged as a modern nation and it was thanks to the Elizabethans that English-speaking colonies were established in America, and that we now live in an English-speaking Western world.
With Elizabeth’s love of the theatre, it was no surprise that this was the age of Marlowe, and above all of William Shakespeare. The poem entitled The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser made the queen into an allegory of all that was wise and beautiful and morally powerful.
Queen Victoria, too, drew on deep wells of the collective psychology to strengthen her position and that of the monarchy. Whereas Elizabeth had been the ‘Virgin Queen’, Victoria was the mother of nine children, the loving wife and then the grieving widow of Albert.
Together, the royal couple created the feeling that every family in the land could draw inspiration from their family: that even if monarchs were no longer the wielders of executive power, they could be the symbols and focus of national emotion; the emblems of an ideal to which we might all aspire.
While male leaders might inspire us to admire their achievements, they generally have not been able to call upon the deepseated response which is evoked by a feminine monarch. Queen Elizabeth II was not an especially motherly person in appearance or manner. She held her emotions in check and was not ‘feminine’ in the modern, American sense of that word: she was not touchy-feely. She would never in a million years have given the sort of interviews on TV which Diana or Meghan have done, unpacking for public consumption her buried hurts and resentments.
Maybe even her most fervent admirers were a little surprised by just how deep and how widespread the expressions of national emotion have been since she died. The phrases that Britons keep repeating about her – that for 70 years, she was always there, that they took her for granted as parts of their lives – do not refer only to the actual person of Queen Elizabeth as she lived her life. They refer to the figure of the queen in their heads, in their dreams, on postage stamps, and coinage. Even the English national anthem is not a song about the people or about the nation, it is a prayer to preserve the monarch.
Monarchists will all respond with loyalty to a new king and wish him well, but it is harder to be a king than it is to be a queen. A male figurehead cannot reach the parts which are touched by a female.
We are now supposedly more ‘female’ than their forebears, more in touch with their feelings, more anxious to discuss emotions.
While the queen’s reign lasted, we British were not especially aware of directing our need for the Eternal Feminine on to her.
It is paradoxical that the late queen, who was so contained and outwardly so unemotional, appealed to the inner child in people.
Today her subjects are responding to her as needy children as they watch the ceremonies unfold of her lying-in-state and, tomorrow, of her funeral.
By contrast, King Charles III is an emotional figure, who shared his grief in his very first broadcast as king the day after his mother’s death, and he was not afraid to weep as he followed her coffin.
It is as if he is reaching out to his people for comfort, not the other way around and, of course, in these disturbed times of mourning, his public’s heart goes out to him.
That is a very different thing from him, a male monarch, providing the sort of stability which a female monarch, simply by virtue of her gender, was able to do.
Perhaps now, with the UK’s third female prime minister, the public psyche will fixate on Liz Truss.
But I somehow doubt this because what is at work when we revere or think about a monarch is so very different from our feelings for the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politician.
That other great Mother of the British Nation, Queen Victoria, was frequently castigated by the press and politicians for not doing enough during her widowhood, for hiding away at home in Osborne on the Isle of Wight and not doing her stuff – opening bridges, attending the State Opening of Parliament and so forth.
But when she died, as an old lady, the country appeared to break its heart and huge crowds followed her funeral cortege.
She had judged rightly. She did not have to do. She had simply to be.
The words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe again come to mind whenever one thinks of Victoria’s last journey across the Solent, and the final laying to rest beside Prince Albert in the Mausoleum at Frogmore, Windsor: ‘The Eternal Feminine leads us onward.’