The end of the second Elizabethan Era
Queen Elizabeth II, 1926 - 2022.
I’ve never known a time when Queen Elizabeth was not on the throne. The world does feel strange and diminished for her loss.
She presided over what will be remembered as a golden age.
Formally, she was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but unofficially she was the whole world’s queen, wasn’t she? Everyone, around the globe, thought first of her when asked to imagine “a Queen.” Even Americans viewed her as queenly. A monarchy is a perfect anachronism in the modern world, but somehow it still made sense that she was the Queen.
My condolences to the country where I spent so many years of my youth. It’s strange to imagine the place without her.
The thought that came to mind when I heard the news was of a line from “His Last Bow,” one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of the Detective and the Doctor: “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.” That was true as well of the Queen. Only Shakespeare, that poet of the Crown of England, could do justice to her long and storied reign. Well, may she sleep peacefully.
This must be what it was like when Queen Victoria died in 1901, after a reign of 64 years. Many had never known another monarch. And who else do we mean when we say "queen"?