Understanding the relationship between the British and their monarchy is, for a foreigner, as difficult as seeing the fun of cricket. In the 1970s and 1980s, my English grandmother and her friends followed the queen's day-to-day life with the same interest with which many follow The Island of Temptations, but with great respect. In my mother's generation, who was also English, devotion to the monarchy continued and, in fact, the only political activism I remember from my mother was hanging the Union Jack on the Queen's Jubilee. At home, royal weddings and births caused paralysis and anticipation, and scandals shame and wonder. Seeing the 24-hour queues to pay homage to the queen's coffin, one can see that the new generations also adore their monarchy.
All of this makes more sense if one immerses oneself in the culture and history of the UK. For 330 uninterrupted years, the kings have not managed the kingdom but have symbolized all its glory. Let us remember that this is relevant for the British, since since then they have won almost all the wars they have fought, including the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars, they led the industrial revolution and brought about the advent of parliamentarism. Very few countries have such a curriculum. All this has generated an unparalleled symbolic accumulation despite past mistakes and embarrassments.
Monarchical worship, moreover, has been fortified with the figure of Queen Elizabeth II. In the seventy years of her reign, the queen never granted an interview, spoke of her preferences or had a public outburst. This hyper-celebrity dedicated her life to duty with the self-sacrifice of a professional cyclist and, if she had retired at 65, she would have ceased to be queen in 1991. Of course, she faced her work surrounded by palaces, servants and opulence, although this did not it produced a hypertrophied ego.
My mother said that the queen's sense of responsibility was the product of Victorian values: prioritizing public duty over personal interest and respecting rules and customs. My mother was also aware that the Victorians of the 19th century were, of course, racist, prone to fisiparity, imperialists and chauvinists, but it cannot be said that these last values were those that characterized the queen.
With this, we say goodbye to a queen, but also to values that previously permeated all of British society. My father, a Catalan, savored them when he lived there in the sixties, but like someone who takes the last dishes of a season that is ending. The anecdotes he told included the lady who gave him money before getting off the bus because he hadn't been able to pay, the policeman who paid for the parking meter out of his own pocket so as not to have to fine him, or the friend who adjusted the car's headlights to comply with regulations Spanish (“What regulations?”, we asked ourselves in Barcelona).
Doing business, observing Brexit or traveling by bus in London, these values no longer seem to prevail. But perhaps the overwhelming, exemplary, highly educated and unfussy behavior of the British, with hundreds of thousands of people behaving exquisitely, means that beneath the weeds and smoke there is still a solid foundation. Perhaps it is that a diamond does not shine if it is in a cave. The latter, I am convinced, my mother would have thought.
