The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The very purpose of modern-day royalty
Let’s admit it. The media had a field day with the death of Queen Elizabeth II. We were able to witness all the pomp and circumstance, the long lines of hundreds of men, women and children waiting patiently to pay their last respects, Great Britain in deep mourning. Some commentators praised Her Majesty’s love of her people, her charm, her dedication to the United Kingdom. Others pointed to the lack of democracy in the monarchy and its colonial history.
Since I am a native of Holland, also a monarchy, the news from England reminded me of my childhood and the role our queen played in it. I found myself thinking of an old framed photograph of Queen Wilhelmina above the fireplace in our living room. Unlike her recent British counterpart, she did not look very regal. More like a sturdy Dutch housewife — dressed in storm gear and big rubber boots while surveying the construction of the Afsluit Dijk, the 32 kilometer dam and causeway across the Zuider Zee (shallow inlet of the North Sea) between 1927 and 1932.
Within days after the invasion of my country by Hitler’s Nazi troops in May 1940, we learned that Wilhelmina and her government had secretly left for England. I remember the looks on the faces of the adults around me. They seemed to feel lost, abandoned, angry. But then a broadcast from the BBC in London had us all huddled around our forbidden radios and we heard our queen explain that by refusing to become prisoners of the enemy and by leaving the country, the government would be able to continue to actively fight for our liberation and the defeat of the German army.
And it did — as we learned from what became the daily BBC evening “Radio Orange” secret broadcasts in Dutch. It lifted our spirits when we heard reports that the mother of our country had raised aristocratic British eyebrows by riding her old-fashioned Dutch bike in London traffic and by shopping at Woolworth because “it was cheaper.” Grownups understood why — as a mother herself — the queen decided to send her only child, Juliana, to Canada to escape the constant bombardments of the city. I was too young to realize that she also wanted to protect the future of the House of Orange in case she herself did not survive the war.
But Wilhelmina survived. Born in 1880, daughter of King Willem (William) III and his second wife, Emma of Waldeck-Pyrmont, she became queen on her father’s death in 1890 under her mother’s regency. She was inaugurated Sept. 6, 1898. (Unlike in England, Dutch royals are not “crowned” by having a crown placed on their heads in a cathedral but are “inaugurated” in the House of Parliament.)
History books describe her as a strong ruler who during WWII took charge of her government-in-exile even to the point of replacing the prime minister when she disagreed with his politics. Churchill famously said of Wilhelmina that “she was the only man in the Dutch government.” Members of my rapidly diminishing generation think of her as a beacon of hope during five years of pure hell. As the war dragged on, daily news from the front and the queen’s periodic personal talks on Radio Orange told us that we were not forgotten. While her words could not warm our freezing bodies or fill our empty stomachs, they helped our determination to survive.
Dutch monarchs, unlike their English counterparts, do not have to serve until the end of their lives. Failing health led Queen Wilhelmina to abdicate in 1948; she died in 1962. Juliana reigned from 1948 to 1980 when her oldest daughter, Beatrix, became queen. She, in 2013, ceded the throne to her elder son Willem Alexander, thereby providing the country with its first king in four generations. Perhaps in recognition of changing times, the new king declined using the historic golden carriage to his inauguration. It now forms part of the Museum of Amsterdam’s historical treasures.
So, in final analysis, are kings and queens just expensive figureheads that should be replaced by more democratic regimes? Perhaps one like our American system, with its costly and ugly fights every two years to elect representatives and senators who are supposed to guide us to the election of a four-year-term president who, in the end, gets picked by a minimum of 270 out of 538 electoral votes?
While writing this, I came across a copy of the Belfast Telegraph of 2011, reporting on Queen Elizabeth’s first visit by a British Royal in 100 years to the republic of Ireland. She laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin in memory of republicans who died for Irish independence by fighting British soldiers. At a banquet given in her honor the queen spoke of the “knot of history” that had been loosened in Ireland through the peace process. About AngloIrish history, she stressed the importance of “being able to bow to the past but not be bound by it.”
As we in this country wrestle with our feelings about Columbus and Native Americans, or Jefferson and slavery, would it not be nice if someone above the fray would remind us that to “bow to the past” can express praise and admiration as well as regret and shame? And would it not be great if we all decided not to be bound by it?
Would it not be nice if someone above the fray would remind us that to “bow to the past” can express praise and admiration as well as regret and shame?