American courting the idea of a queen
SIENA >> In Italy — in Europe — for a family wedding, still working, staying in touch, how is it that an American is supposed to feel about the death of the British monarch?
We don't have queens. We were founded on the basis of getting rid of that very royalty and all that it stood for.
Royals, schmoyals. Off with their heads. And we've made a pretty good go of it.
If King George and his lot had just loosened the reins a bit, perhaps we'd be like the Canadians — part of the Commonwealth, but still on our own.
But they didn't give us any slack.
And we cut down those Redcoats, and we broke free, and we're the better for it, and so is the world.
Still, there's something fascinating about it all, no denying that. The so-called United Kingdom is by now a democracy, too, if not a republic, with a figurehead at the top, and this one did pretty well in her 70 years on the throne — dignified, long-suffering through the mundane duties, welcoming prime ministers born from 1874 to 1975 — and we can mourn the loss of Queen Elizabeth II as a human being, at least, if we are so inclined.
Am I so inclined? That's what I had to ask myself, out to an al fresco dinner in this lovely ancient city tonight, as the news of the death of Elizabeth popped up on my phone. I've got some English blood in me, too, with a grandfather whose last name was Oliver, even if in that way we mutt Americans do I've always leaned toward the Scottish blood that is Wilson, and my mother's Irish family of O'Briens and Eagans inclined me toward antipathy in theory at least to the (made-up name) Windsors, mostly German as they are.
I've leaned toward what my Irish teacher Seamus Heaney wrote in his great poem after being included in an anthology of “British” poetry simply because he was born in the English-ruled Northern Ireland: “Be advised, my passport's green/No glass of ours was ever raised /To toast the Queen.”
Later, Seamus was criticized for shaking Charles' hand at some function. He was merely being civil, as he ever was — more civil than the bloody English ever were to the Irish.
Charles III, that is, as he is now, as of this hot summer night, as I sit on a Tuscan rooftop and ponder the absurdity that is “royalty.” The Italians got rid of their royal family in 1946, though that doesn't stop some dozens of Italian princes, including various pretenders to the throne, from making out like bandits as they trade on their old family names, rather than what — getting a job? Beats working, I suppose.
I would only remind our egalitarian selves that, when it comes to royal lines in other cultures who didn't manage to plunder the world out of the weird fact of their ancestry, we admire and even revere some such clans.
Descendants of the Hawaiian royal family who got aced out of their magnificent inherited lot by the equally imperial plunder of us nominally democratic Americans still, and not without some reason I would maintain, inspire hope among “their people” that their standing could be restored, and that their culture would be the better for it.
It's perhaps in recent cinematic and television depictions of QE II we best glimpsed her mere humanity: Helen Mirren in “The Queen” out on her own at Balmoral making long eye contact with a magnificent giant stag. Claire Foy in “The Crown,” a very young woman at the idyllic Treetops in Kenya learning she is suddenly queen.
She was quite the editor, too. Forced to give a speech at Kingston upon Hull for which the draft said “I am very pleased to be in Kingston today,” Robert Lacey reports: “The young queen crossed out the word `very.' `I will be to be in Kingston,' she explained. `But I will not be pleased.'”