It is the function of the Monarchy both to express and to sustain England’s national identity and all that stands with it. The Monarchy reminds us that our nation is not some recent arrival in the world, and that the threads of continuity between ourselves and our distant forebears—what Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”—have not been broken. England and its monarchy exist today, and five hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago, and one thousand five hundred years ago. And, as we go further back, they vanish together, with no sense that they ever began at all, into the forests of Northern Europe.
But what makes the Monarchy nowadays so disappointing is that Her Present Majesty—“Elizabeth the Useless”—has, during the fifty nine years of her reign, been an absolute failure at discharging any of her positive functions.
Her negative functions she has discharged well enough. To do these, however, she has simply needed to occupy the right place in her family tree and know how to smile and wave whenever she appears before us. If, like the Emperor of Japan, she never said or did anything in public, she would still express our national identity.
But she really has never lifted a finger to sustain that identity. She could have done much to slow the transformation of England into a sinister laughing stock. She might well have stopped it. Instead, even before she became a shambling old woman, Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen, Defender of the Faith, chose to sit by and watch.
