The Queen and the unfashionable idea of self-subjugation

I feel about the monarchy like most British people — I don’t have a huge problem with it, except in egregious moments like Prince Andrew getting away with his various crimes, but I don’t have a huge love for it either. The Queen has ruled my entire life, largely invisibly, so the monarchy is something I’ve largely taken for granted, like Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4 — kind of weird, but not that big a deal either way.

When the Queen died, I didn’t feel sad — she’d had a very long and successful life, and the collapse of the NHS is of more concern to me in terms of national crises.

Nonetheless, I found myself watching pretty much the entire funeral. I was transfixed.

The moment that got me was when the coffin departed from Westminster Hall and was taken to Westminster Abbey. The bagpipes started and played a beautiful, elegiac song — Mist Covered Mountains, which I only knew from the film Local Hero.

The sound of that melancholic song being played by 50 or so bagpipes, as the coffin was pulled through the streets with the royal sceptre and crown upon it, while the royal family and the massed navy cadets trudged sadly behind it… It was epic. It struck the sort of note that epic poetry of the past strived for — the passing of the monarch and the end of an era, like the passing of Arthur, or Cuchillin, or Theoden.

I’d suggest the funeral was the most transcendent moment in British culture since World War Two. There have been many great moments in British history in the last 80 years, but not many transcendent moments. Modern Britain is a very un-transcendent culture. We are an immanent culture, comfortable in our humanism, we don’t see any need to look beyond this world, this life, this self. The Great British Bake-Off is enough for us, with some wildlife documentaries thrown in for awe.

So it was strange that, for one day, we were transfixed by a service dedicated to the idea of eternal life.

It was also a celebration of a person who had sacrificed herself to the ideals of duty and service, who put her God and her nation before everything else. That is a very unusual Christian attitude in modern Britain — the idea of the subjugation of the self in the service of higher ideals.

Here was the power of ritual and sacrament on show, in a culture that has largely given up going to church. And it was mesmerizing.

There’s an episode of the Crown — for my money, the greatest TV show of the ‘golden age of TV’ — where the exiled Duke of Windsor watches Elizabeth’s coronation on TV. He says:

Oils and oaths, orbs and sceptres. Symbol upon symbol. An unfathomable web of arcane mystery and liturgy, blurring so many lines no clergyman or historian or lawyer could ever untangle it…Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Who wants prose when you can have poetry? Pull away the veil and what are you left with? An ordinary young woman of modest ability and little imagination. But wrap her up like this, anoint her with oil, and hey, presto, what do you have? A goddess.

Monarchy is a religion, one of the oldest religions humans invented. Yes, a lot of it was a devious trick to enable the elite to exploit the masses. But the reason it lasted so long was because it was also a way for humans to evoke a sense of awe, ecstasy and transcendence of the self.

That role of the monarch as channel for public ecstasy was replaced, in the 20th century, by celebrities — by the King (Elvis), Queen, Prince, Madonna and so on. Celebrities were disposable icons, giving us a hit of ecstasy, but without any constitutional obligations — we bore them up and we could toss them aside any time we wanted. Eventually, we got bored of celebrities and made ourselves mini-celebrities (or ‘influencers’) through social media.

Princess Diana was really a celebrity rather than a royal. She gave people glamour, gossip and drama, but without any sense of service to an ideal or institution higher than the self and its public image. Meghan, likewise, is a celebrity rather than a royal. She’s from the dominant culture of our time — expressive individualism — when the highest thing in one’s life is one’s self and one’s creative / healing journey to self-actualization. I’m part of that culture too. Most of us are.

That’s what made the Queen’s funeral so mesmerizing for me. It celebrated the life of a woman who wasn’t part of that culture at all. She showed us how much can be achieved when we put our self to one side.