Queen

 

Every Sunday of my childhood we prayed “especially for thy Servant Elizabeth our Queen, that under her we may be godly and quietly governed.” These were the precise words that we expected of her governing. If the service was Matins, or Morning Prayer, then we had not only A Prayer for the Queen’s Majesty (“…so replenish her with the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that she may always incline to thy will, and walk in thy way...”) but also A Prayer for the Royal Family, in which we asked to “prosper them with all happiness.” Although we never saw these people, they were local in our minds. Their presence was formative, their likenesses known. That Monday we marched past the flag in the schoolyard, eyes right at the vital moment, having just sung ‘God Save the Queen’, the national anthem. Adult conversation took on a different tone when the subject was the Queen; it still does. Entire banks of stored knowledge could suddenly come forth, informing opinions political, social, and cultural about these English people. Contact was made via hefty pictorials that detailed every step of their lives, sitting on silken couches or meeting a foreign dignitary or riding horses through the Scottish Highlands. Sepia annuals made way for something called colorgravure. In my childhood we could see the Queen in most public buildings, her portrait squarely positioned behind post office counter or bank teller’s window or headmaster’s desk. Most commonly, though anything but commonly, it was the Queen in her wattle-yellow gown, the 1954 portrait painting by Sir William Dargie. As with any relationship of length, learning more about a person’s politics, society and culture would change the childhood impressions into formed perspectives. It was not a Prime Minister’s bouquet of “I did but see her passing by” that made me think again, but my mother’s comment of “silly old fellow!” A line had been crossed and it was he who crossed it. The slow realisation that half the suburbs of our city had names associated with the Queen’s direct ancestors started to explain the bigger meanings of power and possession. And by the time I was a young adult, the Dismissal of the elected federal government showed in hard relief the difference between the reality and fantasy of the monarchy, the peculiar balancing act of all our relationships. The closeness that we enjoyed in regard to the Queen was sustained by the established maintenance of a distance that itself is a product of time and history. We all know the story of her reign, having lived through the reign, most of us knowing no other, and while we know about the scandals and such like, it is arresting to ponder the words “godly and quietly governed”, in a world today where such virtues are needed.