The Queen's Speech

 

Essays beginning with the author’s profession of faith, either political or religious, are often pretty bad, but what I am undertaking requires one.  I am a sincere democrat (or republican), that is, a believer in that form or government prescribed by the Constitution of the United States and famously described by Lincoln as “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  I am opposed to monarchy, and I deplore the principle of hereditary power especially as it survives in the modern world and in our country in particular, largely divorced from any sense of hereditary responsibility.  Although I was partly educated in England, and spent a career studying the English language and literature (among other languages and literatures) I am not particularly Anglophilic.  I admire certain characteristics of the vanishing British middle class, but Atlantic culture becomes ever more homogeneous in its cultural decadence, and there’s not all that much difference between York and Youngstown when you get right down to it.  Apart from York Minster, that is.  So when I write in praise of the Queen of England, it is not out of predisposition or favoritism.

On Sunday Queen Elizabeth made a four-and-a-half-minute speech to her countrymen, and to anybody else in the world interested in listening to her, on the subject of the huge challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic.  The Queen is an old lady.  To be precise, she turns ninety-four in a couple of weeks.  She has been the queen for nearly seventy of those years.  Her reign has been a marathon of dutiful and dignified service to her country during a period of dramatic social change that has left the nature of constitutional monarchy, always ambiguous at best, nearly incomprehensible to many.  Is she supposed to be a relic or a rock star? Unlike other personages of real or self-imagined consequence, and especially our political leaders, the Queen rarely seeks to speak to large audiences.  But she gave one hell of a speech on Sunday.   Nobody has a better right than Elizabeth II to speak the Queen’s English.  This may sound stilted to American ears.  Patrician or “U” accent and usage are on the wane in Britain, and various big-wigs now aim to sound closer to Mick Jagger than to Lord Cholmondeley.   But when you are ninety-three you have every reason to behave as though you belonged to a bygone age, since in fact you do; and you have every right to act like it.

 

The talk was eloquent though not rhetorically elaborate, and it had a clear and effective structure.  She began by acknowledging the disruption the pandemic has brought to people’s lives, the sorrow that has been thrust on many, the financial difficulties on many more, the fear, the uncertainty.  She then offered heartfelt thanks to the medical professionals of the National Health Service, to their official and unofficial helpers, and indeed to all Britons of every stripe who have been cooperating with the policy of isolation and who have through small but concrete acts of charity and aid been helping to protect the needy, especially the elderly.  Right on, Queen E.!  The circumstances reminded her of her first radio broadcast, at the age of fourteen in 1940, when she and her younger sister spoke words of encouragement to all those children who had been evacuated from the dangers of the German bombers.

It was a serious, dignified, and in some ways somber talk.  What else do you want under the circumstances?  But it was not just a list of “steps” taken by her government.  It was an appeal to all Britons so to behave in this crisis that future historians will truthfully report that the nation had lived up to its historical traditions.  This was the only vaguely “literary” moment in the talk.  One could hear Churchill promising to fight upon the beaches, and behind that Henry V rallying his troops on Saint Crispin’s day in 1415.

In one important function the speech was a pep talk, with a pep talk’s exhortation to difficult struggle and its prediction of eventual victory.  But the basis of the speaker’s optimism deserves attention.  There was nothing in it of the narrow or the self-regarding.  She acknowledges the crisis as one shared by all nations, and requiring a world perspective, grounded for her audience, of course, in their own nation and its responsibilities.  She did not count on pulling through because of “Britain First,” “We are the greatest,” or “I am a stable genius.”   Instead she identified three personal qualities as the ones that could see us through: self-discipline; quiet, good-humored resolve and fellow feeling.

My first reaction upon watching the Queen’s modest video was admiration, but it was soon followed by one less worthy: envy.  I shall not even pretend to avoid odious comparisons.  I don’t know whether our current medical crisis will prove in the long run to be so grave as to define an historical epoch.  I am old-fashioned, and for me history is more convincing as retrospection than as prediction.  But anyone with eyes can see that it is a crisis, that it is huge, that it is ubiquitous, that it is frightening, and that its duration and outcome are uncertain.  When, God willing, we look back upon this episode from a vantage point of relative security, how will we remember our own national performance and the lead offered by our own head of state?  How can I regard a four-minute talk as a near model of Ciceronian eloquence simply because it is composed of coherent paragraphs made up of complete English sentences each of which has a subject and a predicate in agreement?   How can I find it newsworthy that a national leader knows what self-discipline, good humor, and fellow feeling are?