Lying in State
My English Traits, Chapter 22
Just close your eyes and think of England.
Queen Victoria
A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
Octavio Paz
Despite Goethe’s poem (cf. Castles in the Air) in which he exhorts America to celebrate rather than mourn its lack of castles, ancient traditions and fairy tales, successive American governments, state institutions and corporate entities since the late 19th century have been attempting to rewrite American history as mythology.
Their success has been limited to the Hollywood that turned actors into idols, to the Westerns that cleansed the stain of the near extermination of Native Americans from the national conscience, to Superman, Batman and the Marvel franchise, to trickle-down economics, and to Woodstock. A million people turned up. Ten million people remember being there.
Awkward facts, an overly inquisitive press, and the lived experience of their next-door neighbours keep getting in the way.
The USA remembers its history because most of it happened just the day before yesterday.
There are Americans alive today whose great-great-grandfathers wrote the U.S. Constitution, whose great-great-grandmothers picked cotton for white slave-owners, whose great-grandfathers fought in the Civil War, whose great-grandmothers were lynched in Virginia, whose grandfathers fought in the First World War, whose fathers fought in the Second World War, whose mothers marched to Montgomery. They witnessed it, they wrote it down, they told their children. As much as they might have liked to, they couldn’t make it up.
America's past, by which I mean the history of the USA, is largely concrete, generally verifiable, more or less factual, and mostly indisputable. It has what is known as an historical past.
The opposite is true of Britain’s past, and of English history in particular. Because it is so comparatively old, because it goes back to generations so long lost to memory, and because it has been written and rewritten so many times by so many people to suit the requirements of so many times and ages, the English past has become mythic.
Very few people remember it; almost everyone believes it.
Or, to put it another way, there is so much English history it’s no longer possible to distinguish fiction from fantasy. Which is precisely the point. They can make it up as and when they want to. And they do.
So while the average American is more or less content to get their fantasies from QAnon, Pornhub or Instagram, there will undoubtedly be parties with sinister three-letter acronyms in places like Fort Meade and Langley who would kill have to access to the kind of machinery of state the English have used so effortlessly to lull their citizenry into mute compliance with the status quo.
Part of the USA’s problem is that they didn’t have colonies to practice with. Or upon. They had little or no experience in burying, bulldozing or burning the evidence of the unconscionable crimes they committed throughout Latin America and the Middle East. The world knows what America did. And many Americans do too.
Vietnam happened with the cameras rolling. So did Iraq and Afghanistan.
But all countries make history, one way or another. Some just make it better than others.
England manufactures it.
As I write this, the ghoulish parade of performative grief at the lying-in-state of Elizabeth Windsor has backed up from Westminster Hall in central London to Bermondsey Beach, seven miles to the south. It’s a beautifully choreographed fantasy that has millions of Britons weeping as if at the loss of their own dear mothers. It’s a perfectly orchestrated charade, steeped in history, soaked in sentiment, garnished by traditions, names, ceremonies, objects, titles, pageantry and rituals as arcane as they are absurd. It’s undeniably spectacular, relentlessly broadcast, and unstoppably history-making.
And its point is simple: to convince the world in general, and disbelievers in particular, that if The Word can become Flesh, The Lie can too:
“Divine Right” isn’t to be uttered out loud. But it’s what the Cullinan Diamond, the jewel in the crown of the Crown Jewels, will whisper in the ear of every passing supplicant.
Which is not the only similarity the institution of the British monarchy shares with the Catholic Church. This is less of a funeral than a canonisation. Her saintliness may be secular but the memory of her name is built into concrete airport terminals, bridges, hospitals and highways more enduring and more numerous than any of the arts or artefacts devoted to Augustine, Francis or Teresa. It was a reification before it became a deification. The size of the mourning crowds is evidence of how much she deserves it.
Apotheosis by portaloo.
You know there’s something wrong when the news is that there is no other news. The clang and clamour of Ukraine has faded into the soft susurrations of a distant sea. Politics is paused for politeness’s sake, as if to signal the eternal unseemliness of arguing about points of principle.
There is no energy crisis as long as you can summon the strength to stand in a twenty-hour queue; as long as you can dig deep enough into the inexhaustible reservoirs of true British grit that lie buried deep beneath the doe-eyed, desert-dry exterior of even the most slack-jawed of English men and women. If you can’t find it, try fracking.
The stories of their heroics are emerging hour after hour, played and replayed on every TV and radio station in the UK to shame the cowards who couldn’t be bothered. They sound like survivors returned from the frontline of a battle so grisly and so ghastly they can speak of it only in breathless hints and self-deprecating whispers.
It’s hard to tell if they’re channelling Wilfred Owen or Monty Python.
“The first eight hours were the hardest...”
“Ah…”
“Eight hours? It took us ten hours to get from the Mud House to the Mudlark…”
“Awww…”
“Ten hours? Pah! Try fifteen.”
“Fifteen? My nan did fifteen and she’s eighty-six!”
Dignified silence.
“What about you, George?”
George stares into the middle distance as though he’s gazing over the fields of Flanders before blood-red poppies bloomed in the spring sunshine.
“I did it for her,” he breathes at last.
Edith makes the “her” ambiguous by leaning over to clasp his bony fingers in her red mittens. Tears are wiped dry with a white hanky and a strained smile.
Their children will tell their children; their children will tell theirs.
True or false, it matters nought. History has become mythology, and myths live on forever.
My mother adored the Queen, perhaps not as much as she adored the Queen Mother, but she adored her nevertheless. She had caught a glimpse of the young Princess Elizabeth in Durban in 1947 and had been collecting royal memorabilia ever since.
The display shelves in the alcove to the right of the fireplace in the lounge of Drakesleigh were crammed to overflowing with plates, saucers, tea-cups and ribbons celebrating or commemorating this or that Royal Anniversary, Royal Jubilee or Royal Gymkhana from after the Great War to kingdom come. A porky little statue of a Winston Churchill stood among the litter of them like a drunkard just woken up to find that the party was over. Or that’s how my father saw it.
She modelled her manners on the manners of the Queen. She spoke like her, cut her hair like hers, wore make-up like hers, and managed the household of Drakesleigh the way she imagined the Queen would manage Balmoral.
She took issue with her only once. That was when Her Majesty invited Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of apartheid, to attend the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in 1961.
She wasn’t angry, she said. She was, well, just a little disappointed.
They won’t let Elizabeth die any more than they let her live. They’ve spent too much to let her go now. They’ve invested too much in the creation of the cipher she was always designed to be — a symbol, a fiction, a concoction painstakingly assembled from conception to invention as a white-gloved avatar of maternal kindliness, a confection of hats, lace and talcum powder who would wave away the indiscretions of Empire from Cape Town to Calcutta; who, by looking down on them from such a great height and with such a benign and condescending smile, would infantilize an entire nation of grown men and women into believing they were and always would be innocent; who would put the stamp and seal of a divine and virtuous providence on the natural right of wealth, class and good manners to greed, privilege and ascendancy.
Paddington Bear and marmalade sandwiches — the investment will pay off for centuries to come.
Except as an opportunity to transform the fragile fabrication of her mortal life into an immortal legend of selfless service, her biological death is an irrelevance. Her funeral is a consummation dressed up as a tragedy; a transubstantiation of fiction into myth, of make-believe into making people believe. Black becomes it.
It’s a shift in strategy, planned for and accounted for well in advance of the fact. Far from being an ending, it’s the implementation of a long anticipated relaunch — the brilliantly conceived rebranding of a living ghost as an eternal spirit.
Now America and the rest of the world are here to doff their caps at the miracle of it.
They wish they had castles too.