On Public Grief and the Monarchy
By Charlie Standen, Third Year History
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Charlie considers the legacy of public grief and the monarchy in our increasingly chaotic and fragile world
On the evening of November 5th, 1817, Princess Charlotte gave birth to a stillborn child. Upon Charlotte and this child had been placed the future hopes of Britain. George III had proved mentally unstable as king and the current Prince Regent, George IV, Charlotte’s father, proved unpopular due to his extravagance and self-indulgence. The Times, traditionally a pro-monarchy paper, went so far as to write of the latter that he would never hesitate in choosing ‘a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon.’ Thus, now with Princess Charlotte alone, the pious Christian and able scholar, lied the possibility of a restoration of the dignity of the monarchy.
Portrait of Princess Charlotte
However, during the night of November 5th, Charlotte’s condition deteriorated. Doctors, including Sir Richard Croft, discovered excessive bleeding and by the early morning of November 6th, the princess had died. The country entered into convulsions. Sir Richard Croft was so traumatised by the death of both mother and child, especially due to some blaming him for refusing to use forceps in delivering the child, that he fatally shot himself. Dorothea Lieven, wife to Heinrich von Lieven, Russian ambassador to London at the time, wrote, ‘One met in the streets people of every class in tears, the churches full at all hours’. Shops and law courts closed for two weeks. Black armbands were worn in recognition. Henry Brougham later recorded, ‘It really was as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child’.
This played on my mind, when, on September 8th, it was announced that Elizabeth II had passed on. At the time I was in London, and there was no emptying of the streets, no paroxysms of grief but rather a still, melancholic air. On the rainslicked 295 from Fulham Broadway back to Clapham Junction, we passed a number of eerie LED boards and bus stop signs, stating the fact of the matter alongside various photographs of Her Majesty. Overall, and not disregarding the mourners and black cabs that took to the Mall, I found the city’s reaction rather muted. More contemplative than grief-stricken, as in 1817. More than anything, wasn’t it just all a bit ‘weird’? Initially, it seems obvious that the differing reactions between the two times are simply due to the fact that our reverence for the monarchy has fallen quite dramatically. It is often spoken not as an institution integral to the constitutional functioning of the country but an archaic national idiosyncrasy. Moreover, our relatively recent disillusionment with the Empire, something with which the monarchy has explicit ties, in the form of titles, public visits and so on, leaves a rather sour taste when looking upon the pomp of their ceremonies and the luxuries of the royal day-to-day.
But this explanation doesn’t quite work. For it was only in 1997, that Princess Diana died and the streets erupted with feeling much more reminiscent of 1817 than 2022. Disdain for the institution of monarchy was certainly present at this time too. (We are well into the post-Sex Pistols era!) So, if it was not our tenuous relationship to the monarchy that led to a solemn, rather than visceral, reaction to the death of Elizabeth II, what was the cause? Admittedly, in both 1817 and 1997, the deaths were both more tragic. Women taken from relative youth, leaving the public to sigh, ‘What could’ve been…’. The same cannot be said for Elizabeth II, whose reign has spanned both mine and my parents’ lifetimes. But again, the tragic aspect cannot be regarded as the core reason for the outbreak of emotion at these deaths. For what of the Lost Prince, Prince John, who died of a seizure at just age thirteen? Or perhaps Prince George, Duke of Kent, who, in 1942, died in a plane crash? Neither of these royals received the same level of sympathy from the public (nor often are they even remembered). And so, we can conclude it was not simply the tragic element of Diana’s and Charlotte’s deaths that led them to be so passionately mourned.
Rather, the crucial aspect is that they both developed a relationship with the general public in which the public sympathised with their humanity. Princess Diana spoke first as a mother and a humanitarian, then as a princess. Her sincerity and unfortunate estrangement from Prince Charles created an intimate link with the public mind. So too with Princess Charlotte. Prior to her marriage to Prince Leopold, she was courted by William of Orange, who would later become William II of the Netherlands, but the idea of their being married was so odious to her that she escaped to her mother’s house. Again, through this story the public grew closer to her through their sympathy.
But the public, or at least our parents’ and our own generations, never had such a relationship with Elizabeth II. Since her coronation in 1953, Her Majesty seldom allowed her personal life to interfere with her fulfilment of monarchical duty. Through the waning of the British Empire, the Suez Crisis, the Troubles, the terms of Churchill and Thatcher and other significant political figures, she has remained a constant. Her very inexorability led to her being regarded first and foremost as a monarch, not as a person. Her stern and longstanding application to her post led her to become a symbol, a crucial component of Britishness, whatever that may be, but at the consequence of her intimacy with the general public. Thus, those who did mourn, mourned not in paroxysms but rather with a kind of melancholic reflection. The era of Elizabeth II, which had encased most our existences hitherto, was over. And so much had she assumed the role of monarch, that for many the idea of King Charles is a jarring one.