Funeral cues a new lease of life for royalty

It was nearly 2am when I wilted. The hearse was well on its way to Windsor. I was still utterly engrossed and keen to see the final rites at Windsor Castle but sleep would no longer be denied. So I missed seeing the crown, the orb and the sceptre lifted from the coffin.

That must have been quite a moment, the Queen had carried those symbols of responsibility for life. I don’t know what they weigh in mass and it doesn’t matter, their weight on the person conferred with them must be off the scale. I like to imagine the late Queen’s spirit soaring at the release.

It didn’t take much imagination to see King Charles’ thoughts at that moment. They were written on his face in the news clips. He was contemplating the weight coming on to him.

The scale of what happened in London last Monday GMT is still hard to describe. It was more than a royal funeral, not that we had seen one of those before, but it is hard to believe even Queen Victoria’s elicited as big an outpouring of popular feeling.

What was it exactly? Television reporters kept calling it “grief ” for want of a better word but it wasn’t grief. Not even for the family, grief is not what you feel for someone who has reached the age of 96 and died naturally and painlessly as far as we know. English is a deficient language sometimes.

Some other languages, I’m told, have several words for love in its different forms of affection and intensity. We just have love. “Muchloved” was another phrase we heard often to explain the crowds that turned out to farewell the Queen. Much-loved doesn’t quite fit the reserved person she was to the public.

Admired, respected, esteemed? They don’t quite get there.

I think what everyone was loving, for want of a better word, was the magnificence she has managed to maintain for the monarchy over all these years. In her quiet, restrained, dignified way she defied the cynicism, iconoclasm and intellectual conceits of the second half of the 20th century.

What we saw in London on Monday — and what I think the millions who lined the roads knew they would see — was brilliant, unabashed, British royal magnificence that would exceed itself. The muffled drums and slow marching were far more compelling than the om-pah-pah of jubilees, the silence of the crowds more real than the usual flag-waving and passing excitement.

Even the satirists and critics spared us their cleverness for the occasion. One or two dipped their quills in the familiar well of the family’s supposed meanness to Harry and Meghan but that story didn’t work this time — nor did the positive version, that their presence was a sign of reconciliation.

It plainly wasn’t. William and Catherine were barely speaking to their brother and sister-in-law on that brief walk together for the cameras and who could blame them? Why anyone thinks they should take kindly to a self-serving young couple who have decided to cash in by badmouthing the family is beyond me.

Harry looked worried in most shots, as he should be, and his wife looked fearfully uncomfortable, clinging to his hand throughout. Never has their whole business been more of a sideshow to royalty than it was this week. It’s not worth mentioning really.

As Charles watched the crown, orb and sceptre being laid on the altar to await his coronation, he might have been pondering the possibility that the weight they represent had just been increased by the scale of events since the Queen’s death.

His mother has preserved something precious for Britain, for the newly described “realm countries”, hopefully for the Commonwealth and certainly for the world. Each of those audiences has a different relationship with the monarchy and each presents its own challenge to the new King.

Britain and the world are the easiest to satisfy, the pageantry can keep the monarchy in the hearts of its homeland and enchant the world so long as he does not “modernise” it too much. But the Commonwealth needs more purpose and the members who retain the monarchy need more from it.

Prince William is our kind of guy and Harry was equally appealing before he turned into a simpering, self-absorbed, lost soul for the American market. Among their cousins at the funeral were probably one or two others who could relate well with Australia and New Zealand if given royal titles.

But we need them to make a visit when important things happen here, not when it suits some palace schedule.

It should be possible now royalty has received a new lease of life.