History, said John F. Kennedy, never seems like history when one is living it, rather it seems like the past rushing inexorably into the future. It may be true, but yesterday in London, on an already autumnal day, full of fallen leaves, it was impossible not to feel part of history. A million people had not only that feeling, but that certainty.
There are isolated moments in time, both in the lives of countries and people, that are dots, or commas, or hyphens, or parentheses. The apotheosis funeral of Isabel II was a final point, the closure not of a paragraph but of a chapter or a volume of the encyclopedia of history. Certainly the closure of the Elizabethan era, but in a certain way also of the 20th century, if you will with twenty-two years of extension in which two goals have been scored: the 9/11 attacks and the financial crisis of 2008.
Isabel II, without having done politics or anything else other than being there, with dignity and savoir faire, will go down in books as a reference figure of the 20th century in a broad sense, of the epic battle between communism and capitalism, between the vestiges of colonialism and decolonization, of a world that has gone from defeating fascism to opening its arms to far-right parties in several European countries (Austria, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Finland, now Sweden...) , from the fight for the rights of women and ethnic minorities to the defense of the rights of the LGTBIQ community, and from mutually assured destruction in the event of a nuclear conflict to the assured destruction of the planet if climate change is not combated. From a world that has made the transition from ideological to cultural and identity wars, and from a United States that was a bastion of democracy and Western security to a fractured one, with a former president who attempted a coup and has the support of a large part of the population. The deceased grew up in the era of trains and paper, and she has left on Instagram, Twitter and the iPhone 14.
The last time London had been the scene of a state funeral, that of Winston Churchill in 1965, red telephone boxes were littered with coins dropped by people calling home to report that they would be late because they had lost the last public transport; the early morning trains were known as working trains (for workers, because office workers and the middle classes came to work later); and the crowd, to find a place, spent a freezing night in the open, covered with blankets for the luckier ones, and newsprint for the less fortunate. "Today two rivers flow silently, and one of them is an endless line of people," wrote the Daily Mail chronicler poetically.
Yesterday, more than a river, it was a tsunami of people who pressed from Parliament to Westminster Abbey, from there to Wellington Arch, in Hyde Park, along forty kilometers of road from the center of London to Windsor, and on the three-mile tree-lined avenue (Long Walk) that leads to the castle. A sample of British society, with representation of all races, but much more white than black and Asian, and a notable number of tourists who wanted to be there and take a selfie, be part of that history that according to Napoleon "is only a collection of lies on which we agree”, a definition that seems a bit too cynical on days like this. And that Winston Churchill was sure that he was going to be nice to him, because he thought he would take care of writing it (as he actually did).
Isabel II has not written history except in a metaphorical sense in any case, providing stability and continuity in turbulent times, directing (with its ups and downs, which have been of everything in seventy years) an institution that gives identity and a sense of belonging to many Britons, allows them to have that loyalty beyond themselves to which one of the characters in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet referred. His funeral was the largest in living memory, an impressive spectacle with exquisite choreography, the subject of innumerable rehearsals for years, a tableau of reds and blacks with a touch of yellow, with marching marches, drums and pipers, red caps and Tudor uniforms, the parade of the Canadian Mounted Police, the Nepalese Ghurka Brigade, regiments of Marines and the Royal Air Force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Australian Army, Grenadier Guards, Tower of London beefeaters and yeomén custodians, archers, knights of arms, members of the Metropolitan Police and doctors and nurses of the NHS (public health). Symbols of the past and present.
At 10.44 a.m. the coffin with the body of the queen, covered with the royal emblem, the imperial crown, the scepter and the orb, left Westiminster Hall on a gun cart pulled by ropes by 142 sailors of the Royal Navy, followed behind by King Carlos III and members of the royal family (Prince Henry in civilian dress instead of a military uniform), among them little Jorge and Carlota, children of Guillermo and Catalina, aged nine and seven respectively, now second and third in line to the throne after the death of his great-grandmother.
In the abbey, the most important religious building in the country, where Elizabeth II married Philip of Edinburgh and where kings, poets and scientists such as Isaac Newton and Charles Dawin are buried, two thousand personalities attended the funeral, including monarchs, presidents, prime ministers and the emperor of Japan (US leader Joe Biden was late, having to wait at the door for a group of war heroes to enter, before he could take his seat in the twelfth row, behind Polish President Duda) . Before the service began, Big Ben struck ninety-six chimes, one for each year of the queen's life. Prime Minister Liz Truss and Baroness Scotland, Secretary General of the Commonwealth, read texts before the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, praised her sense of duty in his sermon. Even the smallest details of the act had been choreographed to the millimeter by Isabel herself, with flowers from her palace gardens and music by Vaughan Williams, Bach and Elgar.
After two minutes of silence and a lament played by the monarch's official piper, the coffin was again deposited in the artillery car for the funeral procession, with tens of thousands of people on the sidewalks, to the Wellington Arch of the Hyde Park, the center of royal London, which was the original entrance to Buckingham Palace and commemorates the victory over Napoleon. The parade of the different regiments, with Carlos III, his brothers and their sons behind the coffin, to the sound of martial music and perfectly marking time, was a shocking spectacle in itself, regardless of royal or republican feelings, that those who who were there thought that the monarchy was a useful institution, an instrument of British soft power like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Liverpool and Manchester United, or a historical anachronism that goes against democratic values.
At the Wellington Arch, in another display of tradition, pomp and circumstance, the coffin was transferred from the gun carriage to a hearse for the journey to Windsor through back roads, towns and villages packed with a crowd that had waited hours and hours. the procession step. At the castle, which was Elizabeth's main residence in recent years, another smaller church service was held in St. George's Chapel, for family, employees and those who had been unable to access the abbey service.
There is still a week of official mourning to go, but as of today life returns to normal in the UK, Prime Minister Liz Truss travels to New York for the United Nations assembly, and the country is once again squarely facing to the serious problems that have been locked away in the closet these days: the economic crisis, the collapse of the pound, the imminent recession, the price of energy, the strikes in all sectors, the territorial fracture, Brexit, the distrust in the institutions and the political class... Already without the balsamic figure of the queen, and with a Carlos III who, after a lifetime waiting for his moment, is received with a certain suspicion and will have to show that he is up to the task of the mission that awaits him. To make, as Thomas Jefferson said, that the dreams of the future are better than the history of the past. And also that a present full of difficulties and turbulence. Rarely has a nation found itself, in such difficult times, with a fledgling king and premier.
At 7:30 p.m., after all the liturgy and pageantry, the coffin was lowered into the crypt where the monarch will lie for ever and ever with her husband, her parents, her sister, Charles I, George III and George IV, William IV, Henry VI and Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, Edward IV and Edward VII, and Queen Mary. The imperial crown, the orb and the scepter, symbols of her reign, were removed and replaced by a rod split in two, which will accompany the deceased on her journey to eternity.
Stripped of all tinsel, the coffin was sealed by a marble slab bearing an inscription that simply reads "Elizabeth II, 1926-2022." Even in the most classist country in the world, nothing is as egalitarian as death.
