DOMINIC SANDBROOK: King's reign could help heal divisions in the UK

2022-09-11

Once again, we are a united kingdom. It was the Queen’s final act of service: DOMINIC SANDBROOK witnesses a heartrending scene in a pub… that may indicate King’s reign could help heal divisions across the country

Late on Friday afternoon, on the first full day of King Charles III’s reign, I met an old friend in London for a drink. As always at that hour on a Friday, the pub was packed, and we only just managed to grab the last two seats.

On the wall, large televisions showed rolling news coverage of the reaction to the Queen’s death, with the sound turned right down. In about an hour, I knew, the King would be addressing the nation.

For a moment I indulged a private fantasy that when the clocks chimed 6pm, the manager would turn up the sound so that we could listen to our new monarch — as people surely would have done had there been television coverage of, say, the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

Queen Elizabeth II pictured dressed in the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle robes at her Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire

But the place was buzzing with conversation and the young office workers were intent on their drinks. It was a shame, but I knew it would never really happen. After all, I thought, we live in such a selfish, unpatriotic age.

The clock ticked towards 6pm. Almost despite myself, I glanced optimistically at the screen. And then, to my amazement, something remarkable happened.

The picture cut to the King. From behind the bar, the manager turned up the volume. And as if in answer to some unspoken command, all conversation died away and a solemn hush fell over the Coach and Horses.

A few moments into the speech, my friend nodded to the street.

‘There’s an echo,’ he whispered — and there was. The same thing was happening in the pub across the road.

Then, at the end, came the most extraordinary thing of all. When the King stopped talking, people started clapping — not just some of them, but all of them; every single person in the pub, men and women, young and old, black and white.

My friend, a Canadian historian, looked at me and grinned. And I’m not embarrassed to admit that, for a moment, there seemed to be something in my eye.

Some people, I know, might consider this all very sentimental. But a world without sentiment would be a grey and cheerless place. And, as the past few days have reminded us, it is the magic of monarchy, and indeed of patriotism, that it stirs feelings buried so deep that we barely knew they were there.

When the King stopped talking, people started clapping — not just some of them, but all of them; every single person in the pub writes Dominic Sandbrook

William Prince of Wales and Catherine Princess of Wales viewed the array of flowers at Windsor with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex

We’ve experienced moments of national sorrow before, of course — most obviously after the death of Diana in 1997. But the mood then felt more febrile, even hysterical, as the nation struggled to come to terms with the shock.

This was different: heavier, more solemn, more serious, as you might expect given the Queen’s advanced years and historic importance.

For the story of the past few days hasn’t just been the tragic loss of a much-loved national grandmother. This has been a moment to reflect on what it is to be British, and what it means to be part of a wider national and international family.

All families have their flaws and fissures. The Windsors are no exception, as the presence of Harry and Meghan, uneasily welcomed back into the fold, reminds us. And our British national family, like any other, is inevitably imperfect.

At first, watching the unprecedented live coverage of the Accession Council on Saturday, with its cast of greying former prime ministers in their crumpled dark suits, I wondered if the late Queen ever reflected on how the standard of her politicians had declined since the days of Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, the titans who dominated her early years. But as the ceremony unfolded, my churlish thoughts melted away.

Instead, I found myself transfixed by the remarkable spectacle of these bitter political rivals, from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to Boris Johnson and Theresa May, standing shoulder to shoulder before their new King, like an assembly of schoolchildren lined up before the headmaster. (There was, of course, an exception. Jeremy Corbyn turned down the invitation to attend the Accession Council. To be fair, he was probably in mourning after the news of Russia’s military humiliations in eastern Ukraine.)

King Charles III gave his first public address to the nation on television on Friday evening

For a brief, precious moment, the ideological differences of recent years seemed to melt away. The politicians standing solemnly before the King were no longer the bickering antagonists of yesterday; they were simply the people’s representatives, past and present, united in solemnity and grief.

It’s easy, I know, to scoff at such apparent unity. Division is more eye-catching than harmony. To be blunt, it’s conflict, not consensus, that attracts readers.

Yet, even as I’m writing these words, the Sunday afternoon headlines tell a story of national unity. The television pictures show the roads into Aberdeen lined with mourners, the streets of Edinburgh packed with people waiting to greet the Queen’s coffin.

That she died at Balmoral was a coincidence, of course. But there was surely something supremely fitting in the fact that she died in her beloved Scotland. And certainly the cause of the Union, which she valued so dearly, has never had better publicity than it did yesterday, as thousands upon thousands of Scottish men and women lined the streets to pay their respects.

Meanwhile, in a little detail that reminds you just how decent most of our fellow Britons are, scores of ordinary Londoners have gone into Green Park to unwrap the bouquets of flowers left outside Buckingham Palace, so the gardeners won’t have to contend with a mountain of unwanted plastic.

And this, of course, testifies to the magic of monarchy. For would so many people do this for an elected president? Would they turn out in their thousands — and by the end of this week, perhaps millions — for a here-today, gone-tomorrow politician?

All families have their flaws and fissures. The Windsors are no exception, as the presence of Harry and Meghan, uneasily welcomed back into the fold, reminds us writes Dominic Sandbrook

Catherine, Princess of Wales and Prince William, Prince of Wales, chat with well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle

Floral tributes have been laid at Royal residences across the country in the wake of the Queen’s death

There are, alas, always those who prefer to sneer. But it’s telling that so many of our friends abroad, who often see us more clearly than we see ourselves, have reacted to the death of the Queen with such heartfelt respect.

If you doubt it, just look at Paris, where the lights of the Eiffel Tower were dimmed in sympathy, and where Emmanuel Macron — not a politician I’ve always held in the highest regard — paid a tribute of enormously moving power and sincerity.

‘To you, she was your Queen,’ he said. ‘To us, she was the Queen.’

Look at Copenhagen, where the late Queen’s cousin, Margrethe II, led her nation in a moment of silence. Look at New York, where the Empire State Building was lit up with an enormous image of the Queen as a young woman; at Rio, where the great statue of Christ the Redeemer was illuminated in red, white and blue.

Republicans sometimes whimper that monarchy isn’t ‘rational’, as if cold, joyless reason alone directs the course of human affairs. And they’re right: it isn’t.

There was nothing rational about the people applauding in the pub on Friday night, and nothing rational about the vast crowds I had seen outside Buckingham Palace an hour or so earlier — the children in their uniforms after school, the teenagers taking selfies by the gates, the young women with their arms full of flowers, the elderly couples brushing away tears.

But why should there be? Families (and what is a nation, if not a family?) aren’t bound together by mathematical equations or by the conclusions in academic text-books. They are bound by fierce, instinctive, unreasoning emotions — the love of parents and children, the precious bonds between the generations.

There was nothing rational about the people applauding in the pub on Friday night, and nothing rational about the vast crowds I had seen outside Buckingham Palace writes Dominic Sandbrook

King Charles looks at the floral tributes left outside Buckingham Palace in memory of his mother

The writer C. S. Lewis, author of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, had the perfect riposte to those who mocked the principle of monarchy.

‘Monarchy can easily be “debunked”,’ he wrote, ‘but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach — men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch.’

But it isn’t just the romance of monarchy, the pomp and spectacle, that gives it such meaning. The very idea of generation following generation in unbroken succession is, at heart, the principle of history itself. To quote the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke, monarchy reminds us that a society is a ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born’.

As the passing of the torch from Queen to King reminds us, none of us lives unanchored in history. For all our narcissistic present-mindedness, we are merely supporting characters in an epic drama, a great and glorious tale stretching back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, and forward to centuries we cannot possibly imagine.

That’s why the traditions and rituals of Charles’s accession matter so much — and why the issue of the monarchy’s supposed ‘irrelevance’, so often parroted by anti-patriotic columnists, is, ironically, entirely irrelevant.

King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla walk and meet the crowds outside Buckingham Palace

When the King fell silent and the regulars began to clap, they weren’t just applauding a son’s tribute to his much-loved mother writes Dominic Sandbrook

As Peter Hitchens wrote in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, such rituals remind us that ‘we are only tenants, not freeholders, in this kingdom’. For a few short years we have the good fortune to stand on the foundations built by our forefathers; then we are gone, and our children and grandchildren take our places.

At some instinctive level, I suspect my fellow drinkers in the pub on Friday knew that far better than legions of sneering Left-wing academics. When the King fell silent and the regulars began to clap, they weren’t just applauding a son’s tribute to his much-loved mother. They were playing their own small parts in the great drama of our national life, as generations of Britons had done before them.

Of course, history never stops. For good and ill, it rolls inexorably on. This week, all the talk will be of unity, but it won’t be long before the centripetal gives way to the centrifugal, and the old quarrels reassert their grip.

Despite the rousing news from the battlefields of Ukraine, it will be a cold winter. Even with the Government’s emergency cap on energy prices, bills will be high and times will be hard. And for Liz Truss’s new administration — and for our new King himself — the challenges are formidable indeed.

Again, though, history provides a bit of perspective.

Now a new chapter begins, bringing trials and tempests of its own. But perhaps, as strange as it may sound, the events of the past few days have left us in better shape to endure them

The new King accepts flowers to lay alongside the sea of tributes outside his new home Buckingham Palace

When Edward VII became King in 1901, Britain was bogged down in the Boer War and faced a decade of bitter arguments about labour relations and women’s suffrage. Similarly, when his son George V acceded in 1910, Westminster was embroiled in a ferocious row about Irish Home Rule and a deep constitutional crisis pitting the Commons against the Lords.

When George V died in 1936, Britain was still gripped by the Great Depression and was facing the looming menace of Nazi Germany. And when our late Queen took the throne in 1952, the Cold War was at its height, threatening the survival of humanity itself.

On each occasion, we weathered the storm. Now a new chapter begins, bringing trials and tempests of its own. But perhaps, as strange as it may sound, the events of the past few days have left us in better shape to endure them. For in our shared grief at the death of the Queen, from the peaks of the Highlands to the coast of Cornwall, we’ve been reminded of all the things we have in common.

The vast majority of us love our country, love our history and would not change places with any other people on Earth. We think it the greatest privilege in the world to have been born in Britain, and are proud to hand that same honour to our children and grandchildren.

Nobody embodied those values more fully than the late Queen. So it could hardly be more fitting that in mourning her death, we have become, once again, a united kingdom. A final act of service, to close an unforgettable chapter in our national story.

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