Headmaster:
I want to develop three themes in my part of this assembly – those of continuity, of change and of history.
First then, continuity. The Queen was on the throne for 70 years. This is a very, very long time. For the vast majority of British people she has been the focal part of British Identity, whether you happen to be a monarchist or not. During those seven decades the tectonic plates of society in this country have not just drifted, they have been transformed. Through her lifetime and reign she saw the development of our welfare state and National Health Service. The change to a multicultural society and the growth of diversity throughout the cities and beyond as urban growth and suburbanisation changed our way of life. Political turmoil passed through like waves, a cultural revolution and the erosion of deference caused the decay of an old order in society. The rise of consumerism and the growth of status based more on wealth than perceived class. Through her time on the throne change swirled around the palace; she, on the other hand, was the sheet anchor holding firm at the centre of things. Traditions are important when all else seems to be temporary and falling apart. She was the embodiment of all of that.
That’s all change in society, but now spare a thought for the dramatic economic, technological and political changes which she lived through and experienced in her many trips and duties across the world in 70 years. The revolution in communications, the growth of the internet and the shrinking of our planet into a global village through social media. The interconnectedness of a global banking and business ecosystem where countries are interdependent. The growth – and failure – of World Superpowers and the triumphs and disasters of conflicts and famines including in the Commonwealth that she led for so long. The search for peace and reconciliation – in South Africa and Ireland – and the move to independence of most of the British Empire. Landings on the Moon, the sequencing of the human genome. The pace of change has been relentless, but she took it in her stride; a simple hand shake in Ireland, for example, made an immense impact in a place where conflict had been a fact of life for decades.
Lastly, what about the history of all of this? The playwright Alan Bennett writes about moments when history, like a train, rattles across the points and thereafter takes a new direction. That is where we are right now. You don’t have to learn this history, you can watch it happen before your eyes. Over the next week or so you will witness the machinery of a constitutional monarchy in motion as succession takes place. You’ll see the cog wheels of government meshing and moving as the period of mourning moves inexorably to the funeral of our longest serving monarch, and then on to a new era of King Charles. There will be a lot of coverage literally everywhere, possibly too much at times, but don’t dismiss it. This is really important stuff to experience and remember. We are crossing those metaphorical points and a new track beckons.
I’m going to finish my contribution this morning by quoting Jonny Dymond, the BBC Royal Correspondent who wrote a beautiful piece for the BBC website last Thursday. He said this about her majesty:
“She, who with intuition beyond her years, pledged a life of service so many decades ago, made the monarchy the repository of much that the nation loved of itself.
She could do that because her character reflected much of what Britons like to think of as the best of themselves; modest, uncomplaining, thrifty, intelligent if not intellectual, sensible, feet-on-the-ground, unfussy, a dry sense of humour with a great big laugh, slow to anger and always well-mannered.
"I am the last bastion of standards," she once said. She was not boasting of better manners or finer etiquette than others. She was explaining her role and her life. It was her life and her work to be the best of Britain. This was the service she gave.”
Chaplain:
Sometimes in life, we are brought up short by events and reminded that there are things much bigger than us which shape us and affect us far more than we’d like to acknowledge in our day to day self-absorbed busyness.This time last week we were bustling about welcoming Year 7s and Year 12s, full of what had to be done, of timetables, full of all the things which were under our control.
But Thursday evening and the announcement of the death of the Queen were one of those times when nothing changed but everything changed all at once.
It is the third time in my time as a school Chaplain that the beginning of September has been like this. It was at the end of the first week of term when the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales took place and the country struggled to know how to react. It was the beginning of term when two planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 and I stood on the stage of a school hours after as we tried to make sense of the emotions and magnitude of what had happened, knowing the world had changed, fearing what was to come next. Feelings of vulnerability, deep emotion, a profound struggle with the ambiguity of not knowing which way the world’s tectonic plates were going to shift as the aftershocks rippled through geopolitics.
However much we might like to bury our heads in the everyday, and do business as usual, the death of the Queen is a definitive moment. It will define us far more than we’d perhaps like or realise, not least because we will all always remember getting home last Thursday evening and then hearing the news. It’s something of that that is compelling thousands and thousands of people to come out to royal palaces, to the route to Edinburgh yesterday, to Edinburgh Cathedral today and to Westminster Hall in the days ahead. They feel a deep, visceral pull to go somewhere and to be with others. Both are really important.
That’s what we’re doing this morning. We’re not just individuals, able to determine exactly what’s going to happen in life, in total control of our destiny. We’re part of something much bigger than ourselves and all of us need to find ways of making sense of that. Stuff, to put it bluntly, happens. We need to learn how to cope when it does. Business as usual is great to an extent, as a buffer while we absorb change, but we too will need to learn where to go and who to turn to when hard times hit us.
Yesterday afternoon, after the local proclamation of King Charles III’s accession outside my home Church in Wilton, I queued to sign the rather beautiful vellum loose leaves which will be bound together eventually to form our book of condolence. You could do the same and slip into the Cathedral on your way home. Why might you do that?
Well because I think the Queen was a remarkable woman and I believe we owe her a deep debt of gratitude. We have lost someone and something very important. Across 70 years she went to places and went to people in the hardest of times and with the rawest of emotions. She went to places like Aberfan after a junior school was engulfed by a landslide of coal waste. She went to Dunblane after a school shooting. Her aides spoke of how she braced herself before going in to talk to parents because she knew how hard it was going to be. But she did it. She went back to Aberfan several times over the years. She didn’t have to. But she did. Every move she made was scrutinised and often criticised when it was terribly hard to know whether going to a place in the depths of grief, with its inevitable media roadshow would make things better or worse. I don’t think I could have soaked up that many peoples’ grief like that. I know it’s deeply emotionally draining with a single family when I take a funeral. She did so much more.
She helped a doctor suffering from Post Traumatic Stress when he’d recently returned from operating theatres in Aleppo at the height of the bombings in Syria. He froze when she spoke to him and couldn’t speak. So she and he just sat, in the middle of a banquet at Buckingham Palace and fed the corgis together for 20 whole minutes while he gradually began to be able to talk. Would you and I have thought of that? Would we have had that innate sensitivity to read someone and help someone instantaneously. She could just have spoken to the person on the other side of her.
She reached across divides where there was deep bitterness. She didn’t have to, but she did. Visiting Dublin, speaking Gaelic and acknowledging that mistakes had been made in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Shaking the hand of the former IRA leader, Martin McGuinness when the IRA had been responsible for killing someone she loved dearly. Moving peace on, building bridges whatever her personal feelings. Could we, would we have done that?
She was working, aged 96, last Tuesday, just two days before she died, overseeing the transition of Prime Minister from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss. When most people have been retired for 20, maybe 30 years, she didn’t stop because she believed it was her vocation, her calling, her duty.
3 people said to me over the weekend ‘We won’t see that again’. Well, that’s sort of up to us, isn’t it? The Queen leaves a tremendous legacy, but it’s up to our generations now to decide what to do with it. She couldn’t do it for ever. She did more than we could ever have asked or expected. Her legacy of kindness and compassion; that legacy of being true to your calling to the last ounce of your being can end with her generation or be reinkindled by ours.
I love this drawing of her walking away, arm in arm with Prince Philip and a horse and a corgi by her side. There’s another lovely one with her walking away with Paddington that I’ve put on the screens in school today. I like to think that it’s her walking home. Back into the arms of the God who shared her with us and now draws her home.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon her.
May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
