Perspective: Queen Elizabeth didn’t lead a fairy-tale life, which made her so meaningful
Chances were that what you loved or hated wasn’t the woman herself but the institution she embodied, a sprawling $28 billion firm of inherited titles and property. The woman herself? She was a cipher by design. Her position prevented her from vocalizing opinions on politics, elections, social movements and individual people — anything of consequence, really, because modern monarchs don’t run the government even while they appear on its money., horses, hunting expeditions.
The role of queen is not about finding oneself — the arc of princesses, both real and fictitious — but rather about sublimating oneself: in the duty of family, in the duty of work and in the duty of country. In the past few years, especially, her mortality became more obvious. She got covid. She reduced her public engagements. In April 2021, her husband of 73 years died, and in a photograph that circulated widely from the funeral, Elizabeth sat socially distanced and alone in St. George’s Chapel, wearing double masks, watching the casket carrying Prince Philip make its way down the aisle with nobody in arm’s reach to comfort her.
Look, I’m an American, and as such I am liberated from any legitimate impact of the monarchy. I do not have to concern myself with the tax burden, the iffy bloodlines, the intermarriage, the outer-marriage, the jewels, the jubilees, the two-dozen official residences, the Crown’s pomp and the Queen’s circumstances. As an American I don’t have to deal with all that.on what made the Queen so meaningful: She always seemed like a remarkably average woman.
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