Queen Elizabeth II

Over her long reign, the Queen has shaped and reflected the world we live in while remaining mysterious and unknowable. Like it or not, she has been the ...

But the beauty and pomp, however diminished in that moment as a result of the pandemic, also reminded us that she is always and endlessly a person apart; that all of her power resides in this human scarcity. Turn your gaze forward, on the other hand, and this is the same woman who will hand the Beatles their MBEs and the World Cup to the captain of England; who will meet men – Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong – who have walked on the moon; who will open, in spite of the disapproval of her mother, the Channel tunnel. We can only think of her as we mostly do, which for the majority is with a weird, unwarranted fondness. We decide what we think about these things – the Queen was, for instance, horribly cold-hearted to remain closeted with her family at Balmoral after the death of Diana until, that is, she returned in London to talk to the crowds, at which point she was just a protective grandmother – and this is half of the point of monarchy. The Queen is a good at obliviousness, something this must come in handy not only at Christmas, but when meeting the likes of Donald Trump. The mystery that surrounds the Queen, the fact that she is, and always has been, a repository for our high emotions, is her greatest asset. The fortitude that many people feel has seen her through the 70 years of her reign, already in place in 1952, was very much born of the past. One of the strangest books about her, of all the hundreds and thousands that have been published since she acceded to the throne in 1952, is surely The Crown Dissected, in which Hugo Vickers, “an acknowledged authority” on the royal family, carefully corrects the “facts” as they are portrayed in each episode of The Crown, the long-running series on Netflix. It’s one thing to know, as I now do, that the Queen was born, not in a palace, but in a terraced house in Bruton Street in Mayfair (the London home of her maternal grandfather) at a time (1926) when there was still an old soldier alive who could describe the Charge of the Light Brigade (because he – his name was Edwin Hughes – had taken part in it). It’s quite another to insist on moods and opinions and feelings. Her smile, at this point, seemed to suggest that she recollected Churchill as both ridiculously sentimental, and rather wonderfully so; as a human being who had access to thoughts and emotions often utterly alien to her, and which were all the more attractive to her for it. But then the film started, and all of this stuff – coolness; cynicism; the feeling that it is almost one’s duty, these days, to be a republican – slipped away. It was raining cats and corgis by the time I arrived in Finsbury Park last Tuesday, a fact that only served, given the dubiousness of my mission, to make me feel the more furtive.