Grief and glory fit for a Queen

Where Princess Diana upstaged the Queen, the brooding, undignified Meghan Markle has lost the support of the people, while being comprehensively eclipsed by the monarch.

The Crown of Scotland sits atop the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II inside St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh on September 12.

I suspect my experience is common, that of being surprised at how affected I have been by the death of the Queen. It is not grief. It is rather feeling a bit shaken that the world has lost some of its bearings. A taken-for-granted pillar of the firmament is suddenly gone. This is hard to interpret, as it is occurring at the non-rational level.

We live in odd times, ones in which the person with the most formal role in anchoring the institutions of government and law, as well as performing the ceremonial functions of head of state – she was the very guarantor of stability – should at the same time be the central figure in the world’s best-known soap opera. Hers is a very public passing, at many levels.

The response to the death of the Queen, especially in London, has been phenomenal. It is predicted that people will be queuing for 30 hours to see her lying in state. The city is ready-made for staging grand pageants, in the timeless, imposing quality of its ­institutions. The grid of imperial Britain is omnipresent and speaks of a great past that secures the present: Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the Tower, Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column, Waterloo Place, Piccadilly Circus, Marble Arch, the Victoria Monument and Buckingham Palace. One and all are the emblems and vestments of the monarchy, dignifying it.

I think, for many, the impact of the moment is, in part, due to it bringing immediately and forcefully to mind the death and funeral of Princess Diana 25 years ago. This funeral is predicted to even top the crowds assembled in central London in 1997. The two events pair together, perhaps uncannily opening and closing a story of weighty archetypal significance – this, the mythic content, will only become clear in time.

There is the pageantry, which the British are masters at orchestrating. With Diana, the funeral proper for the billions of viewers around the world began with a gun carriage carrying a coffin. Slowly marched through the streets of London, it was tolled every minute by a doleful tenor bell. The mood in the hushed crowds that packed the route, as in the television audience, was leaden and grave, as if each and every person had been left in stunned vacancy by intimate personal loss, as absurd as that was in reality. It seemed the bell sounded its measured toll of the unwelcome eternal void.

Mourners and a sea of flowers outside Kensington Palace for Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997.

As the gun carriage approached Westminster Abbey, it was joined by five “family” mourners on foot – Diana’s brother in the centre flanked by her two sons, Prince Charles on his far left, and the former father-in-law, Prince Philip, on his far right.

The boys’ presence was marked less by their own uncomfortable walk than a white ­envelope on a small bunch of white roses on the front of the coffin, reading simply “Mummy”.

The boys have been back on stage this time, with their wives, the four dressed in the raven black of mourning. There is stilted unease once again, this time due to Harry’s spouse, who seemed for a while to be the new Diana, existing brilliantly and troublesomely on the margins of the family.

However, Diana was loved by the people, and in death she came to upstage the Queen – whereas the darkly brooding, undignified Meghan Markle has lost the support of the people, while she has been comprehensively eclipsed by the Queen.

Charles seemed awkward and out of place 25 years ago, walking behind Diana’s coffin, due largely to his being cast as the villain in the story. Now, after two decades of further waiting, a period during which he has slowly regained public trust, he re-enters from stage right, emerging out of the shadows, this time as King Charles III.

With gravity and barely suppressed emotion, he talks about his mother as he pledges himself to the same ubiquity of service she hallmarked. He participates in scores of ceremonies designed to register his authority. The moment is his to seize and, so far, he seems to be triumphing, winning over the people. Mind, they want to be won over, out of their deep instinct for continuity.

Prince Philip, Prince William, Earl Charles Spencer, Prince Harry with Prince Charles walking in procession behind Diana's coffin.

Hanging over Charles is the curse of being the son of a great predecessor. There is the story of the Duke of Wellington’s heir who, after his father’s death, lam­ented that when he arrived at functions and was announced: “It was only me people saw walking in through the door.”

Charles has the daunting challenge of coming to seem more than a waxworks king, overdressed in pretend military insignia. It is also perhaps a bad omen that, whereas his mother took the name of one of the great British sovereigns, his namesakes were both lacklustre kings.

To move into another key, the death of the Queen and the ensuing days of mourning have the fateful eternal message of mortality. As she dies, so do we all, eventually. For personal reference, we may take the cue from Shakespeare’s King Richard II, a very different kind of monarch in a very different time:

… for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchise, be feared and kill with looks;

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable.

At the heart of this story is anachronism. Here in Australia, that is particularly the case, with the monarch retaining his role long after political ties with Britain ended, and economic and military ones have declined into insignificance. With Elizabeth II, there was at least the link with the earlier age of World War II, the British Empire, and residual legal ties. But with Charles III, there is nothing apart from custom, tradition, and nostalgia for a once-upon-a-time connection.

Catherine, Princess of Wales, Prince William, Prince of Wales, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex on the long Walk at Windsor Castle on September 10.

The British monarchy cleverly plays up anachronism, turning it into an art form. On full display over the past week have been the extravagant pantomime costumes worn by ceremonial guards, but also by major players in the drama from the King down. There are arcane institutions such as the Privy Council that suddenly are given vital civic roles. And there is the obscure, centuries-old language, ritual and protocol, both legalistic and pompous, in which proclamations and assents are couched and acted out. Ancient cannons are rolled into the Tower and Hyde Park to sound the new order. Somehow, all this cements the gravity of the occasion, setting it in timeless stone, rather than ­reducing it to the burlesque farce one might imagine.

Anachronism here becomes parable, with the more ostentatiously ridiculous the scenery and action, the more unshakeably serious its effect. The monarchy is a lesson in civic stability – that is, on the obscure footings on which it is founded, footings rooted in a long past of generations from time immemorial pooling their common wisdom to build national tradition. It seems, like a virtuoso conjurer, to relish making the outmoded fashionable.

Underpinning the whole, it picks up and articulates an instinct in the ­people for the right order that ­Edmund Burke celebrated: “In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, and active monitors of our duties, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry burred shreds of paper about the rights of man.

“We preserve the whole of our own feelings still naive and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity.”

A well-wisher kisses the hand of King Charles III during a walkabout outside Buckingham Palace.

Anachronism is key to understanding the pull of the monarchy in an age characterised by its opposite: fickle social media and its instant nothings, the inflation of petty opinion and prejudice, the rise and fall of vacuous celebrity, and the silliness of identity politics. It stresses understated emotion, stoicism, calmness and long-term duty. It hereby exploits an instinct in the people, as signalled by Burke, to cling tenaciously to the subterranean civic order known in the bones. This provides the security that somehow anchors our lives, saving them from being unmoored by the ebb and flow of ever-changing tides of opinion and circumstance.

There is a warning here about not being too quick to tidy up what appears on the surface as contradiction and mess in the body politic. As illustration, Australians cherish their Constitution and virtually always vote against even the most trivial changes to it. One of the messages of the moment is that the voice is doomed, not to mention the republic.

A simple polarising of institutional order and frivolous celebrity is not clear-cut. The royal family is itself a leading subject of gossip magazines. Diana had an ambivalent love-hate relationship with the media, which she cultivated. Then there have been more serious narrative reflections, notably the 2006 film The Queen and the continuing television series The Crown, all in danger of bringing the institution into disrepute as much as glamourising it.

Despite the Queen’s own stoic restraint, she has overseen a family riddled with scandals of the most pettily commonplace kind. If there is any world psychodrama that characterises recent decades, it is that of the lives of her children and grandchildren.

The hearse carrying the flag-draped casket of Queen Elizabeth II arrives at Buckingham Palace on September 13.

Yet the institution carries on undiminished. Notable in the Australian case is that a Labor Prime Minister, himself a proclaimed republican, has found the word for the moment: respect.

Anthony Albanese has not put a foot wrong in well-spoken, natural and evocative responses to the Queen’s death, in cancelling parliament, in announcing a public holiday – out of respect – and in firmly removing any consideration of a republic from his first term in office. His has been a statesmanlike performance, sensitive to the hour.

Let me return to the theme of twin funerals, and the two great, larger-than-life figures, both women, who command the modern royal story – the Queen and Princess Diana.

Film of Diana in the week after her death highlighted her ministering to her constituency of the rejected, including orphaned children and landmine victims. The counterpart this time is a single stark image. A frail and stooped 96-year-old lady, two days before her own death, props herself up on a walking stick and smiles warmly as she meets a new British prime minister to ask her to form government. Here on display was duty, the continuity of a life of service, but also a signal to the wider world that the bedrock of social stability, set in the institutions of state, also hangs on this, a resolute human thread. I was reminded of John Milton’s:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,

Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,

And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.