When a truly famous and/or great person dies, one feels a sudden sinking thud, as if the Earth had stopped revolving for a few seconds.
That’s how I felt after the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – to name just a few. And that is how I felt on the morning of Thursday, Sept. 8 when I heard on TV while walking through my living room that Queen Elizabeth II had died.
I knew she’d been ailing badly; thus, her death should not have stunned me, but it did. I felt that “thud,” that sudden stop of the Earth moving, that “End of an Era” feeling. Queen Elizabeth, 70 years on the throne, was a remarkable woman even by the most stringent standards.
One day, when I was 4 or 5, my oldest brother, Jimmy, was gluing together one of those plastic hobby-shop models. It was an old-fashioned wheeled contraption, red with gold-colored trim.
“What is it?” I asked.
Jimmy, a passionate history buff, told me it was a little replica of the horse-drawn coach of a woman named Elizabeth who was just crowned as Queen of Britain. Later, he showed me magazine photos of that royal coach in the coronation procession. (At that time, my family had no TV on which to watch the event.)
Flash forward a quarter century: I was living in London, studying for eight months (1980-81) as a student in the St. Cloud State University British Studies program. For a history course, I decided to write a paper on why the British monarchy should be terminated. It is, I figured, a useless relic, like all monarchies in this modern world, not to mention a burden on taxpayers. After hours of research in London libraries, I wrote the paper, entitled “The Monarchy of Queen Elizabeth II: Britain’s Expensive Illusion.”
Monarchism rubs most Americans the wrong way, a sour attitude that connects back to (and before) the American Revolution.
In that paper, however, my critique of monarchism was tempered by a renewed respect for Queen Elizabeth II and by so many news reports and TV broadcasts I’d seen about her through the decades. The research I did reinforced those good impressions.
Elizabeth was – in fact – kind, courteous, gracious without a smidgeon of “royal” hoity-toit snobbery. She was level-headed, down-to-earth, hard-working – doing her many duties dutifully, even in the most dire times of national or personal distresses. She personified the good ol’ British “stiff upper lip” disposition, never sagging or caving in during dark times, like Winston Churchill so ably demonstrated after Hitler’s air force blitz-bombed England during World War II.
Many who knew Elizabeth best claim she was happiest at the royal estate, Balmoral, in the Scottish highlands, which is where she died, age 96.
At Balmoral, she loved to muck about outdoors, even in the mud, with her beloved corgi dogs. Wearing a rain slicker and rubber boots in the drippy weather, plaid scarf on her head, she would traipse along happily. She looked like an ordinary dowdy rural English woman taking a stroll.
For her royal duties, she would travel throughout the world time and again, including to outpost countries of what were once part of the “British Empire.” In receiving lines, she visibly enjoyed meeting people one-to-one, never with the slightest “royal” condescension.
In London, I loved to meet Londoners and strike up conversations, especially at the Warrington Pub in the Maida Vale neighborhood where I lived. Time and again, Londoners told me they admired Queen Elizabeth very much, even though some were not keen on the monarchy itself.
For 70 years, Queen Elizabeth was a morale-boosting figurehead leader for her “subjects,” the people of Great Britain. She buoyed them up, raised their spirits, gave them a sense of pride and unity. Very few – if any – leaders in this world can do that, not for 70 years they can’t!
