Oyour ancestors were better prepared for such moments. The inevitable consequence of witnessing the longest reign in British history is that only a fraction of us have any memories of a monarch’s death – and such memories as exist are faded, unreliable, childhood memories.
The events of the coming days and weeks will be nothing like the royal events we’ve experienced – mostly weddings and jubilees. The nation has entered a period of genuine trauma, a period that will be punctuated by a series of unknown rituals that, behind closed doors, have been years in the planning.
Whatever your stance on hereditary monarchy as an institution, it is simply not possible to be a disinterested observer. There is no exception. Britain is an already instantly changed nation, both dispositionally and materially – our national anthem is now suddenly God Save the King and a new head will soon appear on our banknotes, coins and stamps.
Although profound for us, the coming changes will be modest in historical terms. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, another nation’s monarch, King James VI of Scotland, crossed the border and took the throne. Most people considered that settlement a blessing, as they feared that the death of their Virgin Queen might plunge England into chaos or cause a succession war.
Three and a half centuries later, at the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation, Labor leader and former prime minister Clement Attlee expressed his hope that what the British people were witnessing, through the thick glass screens of their flickering black-and-white televisions white, was “the beginning of a new Elizabethan age no less popular than the first.” That second Elizabethan age is now over, and its end coincides with another final moment in history.
Many of the most profound changes now likely to follow the death of Queen Elizabeth II will take place beyond our shores and, in many ways, those changes are already underway.
After news of the Queen’s death was sent to the prime minister by her private secretary, Sir Edward Young, the next step in protocol dictated that the global response center at the Foreign Office inform representatives of the other 14 nations headed by the Queen. of the state. Next to be briefed were the remaining nations of the Commonwealth, the institution which became the great passion of the Queen’s life and reign.
It was always fitting that a monarch, to whom the Commonwealth meant so much, should become Queen while overseas, in a British colony. That colony, Kenya in 1952, was then dominated by about 10,000 Europeans who controlled the government, the economy and the best land, especially in the so-called “White Highlands” in the center of the country.
Kenya’s separation from the empire, which occurred in the years immediately following the Queen’s accession, would be among the most violent in Britain’s long march from imperial greatness, a stuttering and involuntary journey that began with India’s independence in 1947.
The “wind of change” that eventually brought about the end of British rule in Kenya was already blowing when Elizabeth II came to the throne. Within a decade of her coronation, not only Kenya, but Sudan, Malaya, Ghana, Somaliland, Nigeria, Cyprus, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Sierra Leone, Kuwait and Uganda had all achieved independence.
Today, 70 years later, another wind is being felt across the Commonwealth; a mass awakening to the realities and legacies of imperialism and slavery. New studies and new debates about history are changing attitudes in many of the 54 “independent and equal nations” of the Commonwealth – countries that are collectively home to 2.5 billion people, most of them non-white and 60% of them under the age of 29 years old. .
However, this shift in consciousness, which has long been bubbling beneath the surface, was until recently neither recognized nor understood within the walls of Buckingham Palace. The disastrous tour of the Caribbean undertaken by Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge in March this year starkly revealed the huge gulf that exists between the monarchy and many of the people of that Commonwealth – especially young people.
The tour was described by Palace insiders as a “charm offensive”. In his conclusion, there was little charm, but no lack of offense. Historians may look back on that tour as the first portrait of the era we now find ourselves in; The post-Elizabethan era.
Little about William and Kate’s Caribbean tour – the fruit, it is said, of years of careful preparation – would have felt out of place on any number of tours undertaken by the late queen in the early decades of her reign. And therein lies the problem.
While the palace has clung to tradition – the 1960s Land Rover used by the Queen on her trip to Jamaica half a century ago, preserved and polished like a sacred relic – the world has changed. That such a tour, and the images that flowed from it, were deemed appropriate, in the era of Black Lives Matter, colonial-era statue-cutting and the Windrush scandal, shows an institution out of step. However, as long as British politicians continue to nurture puerile dreams of Empire 2.0 and “shameful Britain”, the monarchy can hardly be singled out as trapped in their illusions.
At the beginning of the 21st century, there are some aspects of the past that can no longer be avoided or documented, even by monarchs. In the 1950s, little was known and little was written about Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. Now that the story is out of the bag, it is taught in schools in Britain and, more importantly, in the Caribbean. What that history reveals is that the monarchy itself, not just the British state, has a moment of reckoning ahead, as three monarchs – Elizabeth I, Charles II and James II – were directly involved in the enslaved African trade and two others. George III and William IV, defended the system. Another royal tour of the Caribbean and America, the 13th of the Commonwealth’s 54 nations, feels unthinkable until Britain and its head of state are able to face these realities. Judging by recent speeches, King Charles III seems to understand these realities.
The big opportunity given to the monarchy, which many hoped would enable it to perform the cultural equivalent of a “grand forward”, was the marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle; a woman whose presence and voice had the potential to make the monarchy feel more relevant to the 21st century and enable it to more closely resemble modern Britain and the modern Commonwealth. But Meghan was slaughtered by the sharks of the British tabloid press and Harry has become – literally – the prince across the water.
Perhaps it is a testament to the extraordinary esteem in which Elizabeth II was held that the next wave of challenge and reappraisal was partially postponed until after her death. Barbados’ decision last November to become a republic is a sign that the pressure for change is now reaching a critical juncture. There is no escape from history for either the new monarch or the Commonwealth, the institution the late Queen did so much, for so long, to hold together.
David Olusoga is an Observer columnist, professor of public history at the University of Manchester and a broadcaster and documentarian
