On Knowing—And Not Knowing—Queen Elizabeth II

I’m not sure if you noticed—perhaps you were buying winter knits, or bemoaning Disney’s new Black mermaid—but Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning monarch, passed away on Thursday.

When the news broke, I was hesitant to write anything about her un-sudden death, feeling that there was no hot take, no witty aside. I felt neither relieved or bereft, just that void feeling that one of the most prominent figures of Britishness was gone. Is gone. I was worried about piling onto the din of conversation, of being either too glib or too fan-girly, but it’s impossible to ignore the royal family, saturated as they are in all of our lives. 

Twitter was awash with responses both kind and snarky. Even the most rudimentary critical thinking will have you questioning excessive wealth as Britain enters an energy crisis and thousands of households have to choose between eating and heating. But it’s objectively sad when someone dies, regardless of the wealth and privileges they were born into. The queen’s been on British coins for longer than most of us can remember—that’s not not a thing. Whether you’re a royalist or a republican or something in-between, Elizabeth’s tenure as head of state is nothing to be sniffed at. Seventy years is quite the innings.

I’m finding the 24-hour rolling news coverage both insufferable and fascinating. It’s sort of macabrely brilliant to watch newscasters grab for commentary over endless footage of a car driving through the country and people looking at it sadly. (For the record, you have as much right to heckle as to openly mourn, regardless of the recent arrests for protesters. Free speech extends to all of us.) The news reporting is aggressively persistent—flipping to a quick recap of Love Island would feel like treason—and yet somehow also fact-less, all opinion without definite insight, conjecture without evidence. Royal pundits are summoned to give us glimpses of the real Elizabeth, of a queen at ease, but they’re reaching. It turns out there’s very little to say about a head of state who’s lead such a public life while keeping her private life so unspoken, so unverified. The feeling that we never really knew the queen, that we don’t really know any of the royals, prevails.

 That’s the magic of the royal family. Their power is both material and symbolic, but most dominant is their sense of mystique. We can but guess, but being on the gossip-y sidelines of royal snafus is kinda… fun? Did Meghan make Kate cry, or vice versa? Was that really over the etiquette of tights in summer? Did the name Lilibet anger the queen? Have Harry and William made up? Footage of nothing more than a leaky pen can get us speculating for hours. I appreciate that allegations of racism are less flippant—they are truly abysmal—but the frippery of royalty is intoxicating, the way they juggle the airs and graces of ordainment with basic human existence is endlessly captivating. Everything that happens feeds into our own preconceived sense of royalty. For some, each trifling story insulates a love of the royals, for others, it strengthens the case for abolition.