Tuesday 5 June 2012

God Save the Queen

I went to London to visit the Queen. Well; I went into The City to watch the Diamond Jubilee flotilla. I went largely because someone I know and used to work with in Vancouver was here to paddle in a dragon boat in the flotilla, otherwise I may have been tempted by the hideous weather to just stay home and watch it on telly like everyone else.

But a curious thing happened. I became intensely interested in the Queen and everything about her. I mean, I grew up singing "God save our gracious Queen, long live our noble Queen" in school in Canada. The night before the flotilla, we watched her son, Prince Charles, talk about her in a BBC television program that shared many minutes of private film footage from the Windsor family.  From the earliest days of her marriage to Prince Phillip, Elizabeth wore her destiny, not like a hair shirt, but more like a shining mantle.

 headline4 Queen sails in 1,000 boat diamond jubilee flotilla

As the culminating proof of her almost zealous commitment to her people, Sunday afternoon the 86-year-old monarch stood bravely in the face of wind and rain, for four miserable hours as she was paraded down the Thames on a barge to the delirious approval of almost a million of her subjects who gaily lined the banks of the river in the rain, waving and wearing flags in equal measure. She never once sat down in the on-board throne specially designed for her rest and comfort.To my amazement, I have concluded that she has been, and continues to be, gracious and noble. I'm not sure I even knew what that meant before this long holiday celebration weekend.

To those of you of a republican bent, you may still not know what it means. But something else occurred to me, perhaps as Hosni Mubarak received his jail sentence and civil war by any other name rages in Syria and Charles Taylor is finally brought to justice: the sovereign has another, less talked-about role in this otherwise very modern democracy.

What if the Queen (and the monarchy) plays a very real and critical role in legitimizing the government and deterring any coups? What I mean is, maybe having a Queen or similar benign despot actually helps to prevent the violent overthrow of the democratic system?  I mean, if you want to sneak in and start making things autocratic, you would have to either have the consent of the monarch, in which case the people would very quickly catch on and make Parliament DO something about the uppity monarch, or, in the case where it is the Parliamentarians wishing to usurp power, it would  become apparent when the first thing they wanted to do was to get rid of the monarch (or replace them with some hand-chosen variant not of the House of Windsor).

I realize this is a very cursory treatment of what could be a vast and in-depth political treatise, but it is late and I have been going quite hard for the last four days or so, not wanting to miss any of the excitement. A lot has been written and said about Her Majesty this week, here and elsewhere. Goodness knows I'm no Plato or Aristotle, but I feel that the wheels of politics and of society sometimes, or oftentimes, turn within each other and it doesn't hurt to think about what some of this stuff means.To me, tonight, it means that I have a new respect and admiration for Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, that will not soon leave me. God Save the Queen.
God Save The Queen at St. Paul's