Those of us who are nearly her age can remember the Queen’s ascension to the throne and the cheerful delight with which people talked of the “New Elizabethan age”. Her coronation fitted well with the postwar feeling that we had won the war and we were now going to make sure we had a splendid new Britain with this attractive figurehead.
The word “coronation” got attached to all sorts of unlikely things – we still call a certain curried dish “coronation chicken”. An attractive young lady taking the throne as the country came to light again after the war seemed perfect.
Since then, whatever you may think of the monarchy now, in a good many ways Queen Elizabeth has been an excellently modern figurehead, and that nowadays is what royalty at its best has to be.
Of course, a lot of people are rather scathing about the royal family, saying we shouldn’t have to pay for them. But I still think they do some good. A large part of the usefulness of royals these days is to provide a set of people more engaging than just successful millionaires, stars of screen and stage, or political people whose theories we may loathe. And this Queen marrying a handsome Greek, giving birth to a bright and interesting successor and some news-ready spares, has done what royals these days are expected to do: provide attractive alternatives to rulers who have used force or cheating to get there.
What’s more, modern royalty doesn’t hide itself away: quite ordinary people like my husband – even me – get asked to Buckingham garden parties. The royals and their attendant aristocrats no longer run the country, but they still have a place in the general feeling of what things ought to be like: a useful and colourful part of our more attractive traditions.
What do you think? Have your say below
