She hovers there in the halfway world of dream. A long constant presence in the life of a people has that effect. Her iconography has penetrated the subconscious of the land and many lands. It is perhaps why she felt at once so forbidding, so familiar and so intimate, as if in beholding her you encounter something more than a person or a monarch. It may be one of the greatest secrets of royalty, that they have made themselves, through the intimate art of portraiture, into figures so familiar that they seem to be a part of the furniture of your psyche. And yet they are so remote.
This is not true of all royalty. But it is true of the queen. The technique of portraiture made natural by Leonardo Da Vinci has been used with her to great effect. But nearly 60 years of casually encountering that face on coinage, on pound notes, in newspapers, on commemorative posters, on schoolwork or on television, slowly turns a face into a tradition. It was why she had a magical effect on people.
She had that effect on me. Whenever I met her I was always struck by her special aura. I remember being invited to Buckingham Palace as part of a celebration of arts and culture. A small group of us, comprising William Boyd, Sheridan Morley and myself, found ourselves with her. She asked us questions about our art, and I ventured to make a contingent joke, and was rewarded with the unforgettable peal of her laughter. And her laughter made us all laugh. It is not enough said about her, but she had a wonderful sense of humour.
It was illuminating to witness that effect on lines of important men and women waiting to be presented to her. The effect the famous have on people is nothing like that. The famous bring out in people some sense of experiencing the improbability of a material fact, something seen in one medium now present in the flesh. But to watch a line of some of the most powerful people in the world waiting to be introduced to the Queen was to watch something unreal, the visible form of the magnetic power of the moon on the tides.
People struggled to compose themselves before they were to be announced. Animation or sometimes panic came over their features. This could be seen with republicans as much as with royalists. The reason for this was something more than monarchy itself. It was one of the secret achievements of Queen Elizabeth herself. The source of that achievement is that she is a solid part of the nation’s subconscious. And a nation’s subconscious is a particularly difficult place to enter, especially a history-saturated nation like Britain.
It is this curious fact that explains the nervousness attending the transition feared at her passing. It is this that explains the restiveness, the dread of a lacuna. It is not only this nation that feels it. This is felt also by nations linked to Britain by history, colonial history transmogrified into Commonwealth history.
The Commonwealth nations held her in the highest esteem. This is partly because of the respect she showed their leaders and the appreciation she had for their traditions, as well as her many visits to those lands. In visits during the early years of her reign, thousands eagerly lined the routes of her cavalcade in enthusiastic greeting. Many of those nations will feel her passing intimately.
But the fear of instability at her passing is illusory. Some Commonwealth nations might see this as the moment to no longer have the British monarch as their head of state, and there may have to be adjustments to the monarch’s role as head of the Commonwealth, but the core of that relationship should remain. The monarchy will continue in Britain, meandering on, with its curious, seemingly ineradicable, intermingled existence.
Monarchs have passed away before, but there is something special which Queen Elizabeth has done, which makes it harder for the nation. She blurred the boundaries between her reign and the realm.
She was a Queen that was hard for republicans to reject, hard for those who are against the monarchy successfully to protest against. She was an excellent advertisement for the monarchy because she did best in recent times what great monarchies through the ages do to their people, become part of their psyche. She did it so well that in some way to think ill of her was to think ill of oneself. It is how kings and queens through the ages have ruled and made their people feel the legitimacy and inevitability of their rule.
Queen Elizabeth ruled at a time when the spiritual energy of the world was moving from a male-centred universe to one desperately in need of feminine energies. After two world wars, after the toxicity of Nazism, which was male energy at its most disordered and insane, what the world truly needed, at the level of its subconscious, was a female force, a stable, balancing, presence.
This meditation is not concerned here about the rightness or the wrongness of the monarchy. It is an observation on why Queen Elizabeth was especially successful. Deep down what the world needed after the upheavals of wars and the violence of empire and the rampant capitalism that damages and diminishes humanity was the touch of the high maternal. It is the same reason why in past ages, in ancient civilisations, certain goddesses came to the ascendancy to compensate for particularly bloodthirsty epochs.
This is why in many ways the phenomenon of Queen Elizabeth is different from the particularity of Elizabeth herself. But she has to be credited with knowing how to let the person of Elizabeth be the vehicle for the subconscious phenomenon that was Queen Elizabeth.
How many people know how to let myth work through them, exalting their station and their presence, wielding a force and an influence in the world vastly disproportionate to their person? Many years ago, Prince Charles, in an interview, agonised over the difficulty of getting the common man to understand the notion of the divine right of kings. That struggle was appropriate. It is hard, even impossible, to get people to understand that notion. It is difficult nowadays to get people to understand the divine right of anything – unless it be the divine right of freedom, the divine right of life itself. Everyone wants to be independent, to stand on their own two feet, not to look up to anyone, not to feel inferior to anyone by birth, or by colour or gender. Everywhere people are fighting for freedom.
This does not mean that deep down people don’t need a mother or a father, and don’t want to run back to those archetypes. But we have entered a new age. The gods have tumbled down. Nietzsche claimed that God was dead. The church struggles. People lose their faith and their beliefs daily. This perhaps makes us porous. And into that inner porousness, that vacuum between two periods, a transition from an old world to a new world, the figure of Queen Elizabeth was just what was needed. The nation drew her into its psyche for shelter and for stability, in a world where empires were falling and the great dependable structures were all crashing down one after another.
Hence the power of that iconography, that Leonardo calm and enigma, that constancy in a world where leaders of nations prove themselves comical figures and tin men, psychopaths and monumental narcissists.
Much has been said about the monarchy but not enough has been said about its place in the nation’s psyche. Who will psychoanalyse this nation from the aspect of its need of kings and queens? Therein lies the true enigma of Britain. When men and women of power adjusted their faces, as they waited in anticipation to be presented to the little old lady who was their queen, who fixed each one with a piercing and compassionate gaze, we caught a glimpse of the secret of that ancestral spell, the source of one of the longest enchantments in history.