Pageantry in a TikTok world
Here in America — in a harried, workaholic culture stripped of all but trace amounts of pomp — many profoundly feel the loss of a queen.
Twenty-one years ago this month, days after terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers, thousands gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace as royal brass musicians, on order of the queen, broke with centuries-old tradition, marking the changing of the guard by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
An old TV clip of that day in 2001, widely shared on social media Thursday, shows people singing, waving mini American flags and wiping away tears as the American anthem rang outside the halls of royalty in London.
The moment is fondly remembered by many Americans as one of solidarity between Great Britain and the American people — but today, as we mourn the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, it takes on even greater meaning.
It’s a reminder that the royal pageantry and tradition often diminished by critics as superfluous anachronisms that ring hollow in our modern times also have the power to comfort in crises, inspire amid despair and resonate over oceans.
There’s a reason world leaders, including many U.S. presidents, bowed before her and why her visits were greeted with such fanfare, including her 1991 trip to Texas, where she toured mission control at NASA, the VA medical center with renowned heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, and went home with a pair of cowboy boots for her and her husband, Prince Philip — red alligator for her, black ostrich for him — made by Houston bootmaker Rocky Carroll, who had also made boots for President George H.W. Bush.
She was grand in a fast-food world starved for grandeur, she was a beacon of stability through times of tumult, and she was a queen who, decade after decade, proved herself truly worthy of the title.
When news broke Thursday of Elizabeth’s death at the age of 96, ending a reign spanning 70 years, 15 British prime ministers and every American president from Harry Truman to Joe Biden, the responses on social media were disorientingly disparate. Some reveled like tabloid editors, posting memes poking fun at her family’s knack for folly and dysfunction, and the queen’s own proclivities and controversies: her aloofness, her strained relationship with Princess Diana and silence after her death, her inability to keep Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in the royal orbit. Many Brits, meanwhile, seem to grieve as though they’ve lost a grandmother.
“She’s the only constant we’ve had in our lives,” said one of the many London taxi drivers who had lined up outside Buckingham Palace to pay respects.
“I’m trying to write a column and I find myself in tears,” tweeted the conservative British-American writer Andrew Sullivan. “I fear that everything she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world.”
A great many of us are nodding our heads at that sentiment, even those of us Americans who otherwise applaud social progress and agitate to hasten its pace, who prefer elections to royal blood lines and transparency to opaque governance, rigid class hierarchies and colonialism.
The truth is that the death of the modern world’s longest-serving monarch presents a bit of an inkblot test: those shedding tears are more likely to view traditions and institutions with some regard, perhaps even reverence; those partying in Twitterverse are more likely to view them with skepticism, even contempt.
This editorial board prefers to give them the benefit of the doubt, to know and understand the rules before we call for tearing them down. That’s not always the Houston way, of course. This is a city of new money, where audacity eats etiquette for lunch, where billions are made at white-clothed tables where nobody can even tell you the proper positioning of a salad fork, and where beloved landmarks are preserved with a fresh coat of pavement.
Here in America, in our harried, workaholic culture, stripped down of all but trace amounts of pomp that we reserve for weddings, inaugurations and the Oscars, how profoundly we feel the loss of a queen who lived in opulence a continent away might come down to one surprising thing: humility.
How’s that? No matter what you think about the future of the monarchy, or whether you’ve watched even one episode of “The Crown,” the world just lost a precious link to our history, a wise woman who personified strength at a time when few women got the chance — a leader who reigned through crises most of us have only read about in books.
We’ve lost a world leader who may have had nominal political power but whose example through decades of selfless duty to her country inspired her subjects and people across the globe.
“My whole life, whether it be long or short,” Princess Elizabeth declared in a 1947 radio broadcast to listeners across the British empire and former colonies, “shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”
She never strayed from that commitment. She was steadfast, some would say to a fault. In her time as queen, the world transformed around her even as she largely refused to. Independence movements in colonized nations across the British Empire began before she was crowned and continued well into her reign. The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s saw the successful strivings for independence of dozens of nations that had been colonized by the crown as part of a global empire that the sun, the saying went, never set on. Even in 2022, there were still nations looking to oust the queen as head of state.
In recent years, the royal family has increasingly been pushed to recognize its historic role in the slave trade, colonization, pillaging and violence that brought the crown so much of its wealth. For many, the royal family is associated not with pageantry but with economic devastation and mass starvation brought about by British rule. The 1943 Bengal famine, more a result of policy than a lack of rain, killed up to 3 million people.
This year, when members of the royal family visited Jamaica — where calls for reparations have been echoed for decades — they were met by protesters with signs that read “Apologize now,” according to the Associated Press. “Kings, Queens and Princesses and Princes belong in fairytales, NOT in Jamaica!” read another.
Still, the complexity of the queen’s relationship with former colonies was evident Thursday in a statement by Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness: “It was with great and profound sadness, that I learnt of the passing of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. … We join our brothers and sisters in the Commonwealth in mourning her passing, and pray for the comfort of the members of her family, and the people of the United Kingdom, as they grieve the loss of their beloved Queen and matriarch.”
In the end, the queen did not find a way to move the monarchy into the
21st century and to reckon with the ongoing consequences of imperialism that have left the world more unequal, more unstable and more vulnerable to disaster — climate, refugee and otherwise. Has her failure to evolve the monarchy left it so brittle it has, as some argue, become irrelevant? King Charles III will no doubt discover the answer as he inherits the crown.
We’d say he’s got big shoes to fill, but given that the queen was reported to be a dainty U.S. size 6, we’d say the measure of her legacy is found instead in people’s hearts. Her own heart, she told them in a radio address in 1957, acknowledging her largely symbolic role, was really all she had to give them. Judging by the tears this week, it was mutual.