A loyalist and a queen

iChère amie, cher ami,

We were staying at an old coaching inn in the English countryside during the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. We sat down to watch in the hotel sitting room...

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“Loyalist!” declared our grandfather, frowning sternly.
 
In Granville Ferry, we never used the word “Tory” to describe those on the losing side of the American Revolution. Rather than join the rebellion against the king, our grandfather’s maternal ancestors had migrated to Nova Scotia, Canada.
 
In 1916, our grandfather had loyally joined the British forces in the Great War. He flew a Sopwith Strutter for the Royal Air Corps. Shot down over Bulgaria, he spent a year and a half in a camp for prisoners of war. It was cold and he was often hungry.
 
His recollections amused us greatly.
 
“Gor’ blimey O’Reilly, you are looking well!
If you’re the O’Reilly that keeps the hotel,
Well, gor’ blimey O’Reilly, you are looking well!”
 
The nonsensical little ditty, which he often addressed to us at meals, came from those days. It had something to do with a fellow prisoner named O’Reilly who complained of the rations.
 
“Look, eh!” our grandfather would command, flourishing a large molar between work-hardened fingers. It was his own tooth. He held it down so we could look at it closely.
 
“There’s the mark of his thumb!” 
 
The camp dentist, also the local blacksmith, had melted down a gold coin from our grandfather’s pocket and then, with his great smoke-blackened thumb, jammed it into the tooth’s cavity. The filling lasted for decades in our grandfather’s jaw until it ornamented the top of the television set in Hell’s Half Acre, his study.
 
On the wall hung a photograph of our grandfather as a young man, dressed in his leather helmet and jacket, standing in front of his plane.

We always thought the Germans had snapped it, because our grandfather would point to it and then recount:
 
“After they shot me down, we were chatting and I asked for a cigarette. They gave me a light. I spun around and blew up the plane. I couldn’t let it fall into enemy hands.” He shook his head grimly.
 
“They were going to shoot me on the spot, but in the end they sent me to the prison camp.”
 
His Sopwith was one of the first British models with a synchronized propellor. It allowed our grandfather to fire a machine gun as he flew.
 
Our grandfather had been knocked out of the air in a dogfight. He had challenged a German pilot who, the day before, had pitilessly gunned down an RAC comrade in arms.
 
“Not sporting,” our grandfather told us contemptuously. “The poor fellow was on the ground, the pilot had already shot him down.”
 
There were aspects of our grandfather’s war experience that we only understood in a shadowy way. Before training as a pilot, he had been in the Canadian Field Ambulance at the battle of Ypres. He rarely mentioned it.

“War is a damn fool thing,” he once said, a pained look in his fading blue eyes. “But war separates the sheep from the goats.” 
 
We understood that our grandfather had high standards.
 
“No sense of duty!” he told us, referring to the abdication speech of Edward VIII. The future Duke of Windsor had renounced the crown in order to marry the woman he loved.
 
“He was the King.”
 
Until then, I had only thought of the abdication as a sincere and romantic gesture. Edward was true to himself, true to his love. But of course, my grandfather had lived through two World Wars, the failure of his family’s business interests, the Great Depression. His only brother, badly wounded in the War, had died early. Our grandfather had helped bring up his nieces as well as his own daughters. He was staunch.
 
Last month, the former king’s niece, Queen Elizabeth, died. We happened to be in England the day of the funeral. At first, I watched the ceremony idly, stopping for a moment in the hotel sitting room, not sure how this event concerned me or if it did. The coffin, draped with the red and gold royal standard, was at the steps of Westminster Abbey.
 
On either side of the television’s big screen hung 17th-century portraits. The room’s oak paneling was dark with age. It overlooked a cobbled yard. We were staying in a very old coach house on the estate belonging to the Duke of Marlborough. A short walk away, behind high park walls, was Blenheim Palace, built by an earlier queen for her victorious general, John Churchill. 
 
Perhaps it was the pomp and history that surrounded us, but I sat down and watched the entire ceremony. As the pallbearers carried with coffin through the mourners, the music began:
 
“I will lift mine eyes up unto the hills from whence cometh my help…he that keepeth thee will not sleep...”
 
“O Death, where is thy sting?” asks the apostle Paul in one of the readings from Scripture. “Be ye steadfast,” he admonishes.
 
As the body was carried out of the Abbey to its final resting place, a single bagpipe played a song that is both a lullaby and a lament: “Sleep, dearie, sleep.” 
 
Our grandfather would surely have been pleased that four Canadian Mounties led the funeral procession to Windsor Castle, on Canadian horses.

He would have approved of the entire ceremony. Like the Queen, he had lived long enough to plan his own funeral. He chose the hymns and the psalms. He wanted the Nunc Dimittis read, with the priest Simeon’s words to God: “Now let this thy servant depart in peace.” A duty had been performed; a life’s work accomplished; now death could come.
 
We followed our grandfather’s notes carefully, until we came to the list of pallbearers. These had been crossed out and new names written in many times in the course of his long life. In the end, his four grandsons carried the coffin.
 
His funeral took place during a snowstorm in the small town where he was born. It was sparsely attended. His many friends, and even their children, had gone before him. 
 
The town ambulance carried my grandmother to the graveside; I traveled with her. The driver opened the back door so we could watch the coffin committed to the earth. The wind howled and sharp driving snow stung our faces. We could barely hear the minister say, “I know my Redeemer liveth…and mine eyes shall behold God, and not as a stranger.”
 
My grandmother nodded and shut her eyes. She lay back on the stretcher. The driver closed the door. We left him beside his parents and his brother and came home to a quiet gathering in an empty house.
 
The Queen’s funeral, in contrast, was splendid, as befits a person whose life represented far more than the sum of her own particular feelings and experiences. The reign of Elizabeth II was a thread uniting eras, history, events, the peoples of an unravelled empire. Yet for the end of these two lives, the ritual was essentially the same: an act of faithfulness, of remembrance and comfort against the wintry reminder that life is fleeting and those we love must perish.
 
“Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live…He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow…” the choir sang in Westminster Abbey a few weeks ago.

Back in France, even the hardiest republicains marked the subject of the Queen and her funeral with a cautious if not completely approving tone. Libération, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre as a newspaper of the l’extrême gauche, the hard left, titled its edition “La Peine d’Angleterre,” “England grieves,” with a photograph of the monarch as a chic but thoughtful young woman. Millions turned on their “poste” to watch the ceremony.
 
The “inoxydable monarchie” – the unrusting monarchy – as one journalist described it, has a deep appeal in France. Is it just “des fanfreluches, du folklore et des carrosses dorés” – vain trinkets, folk tales, and fancy carriages? 

Queen Elizabeth dedicated her life to being a monarch. Since her coronation at age 26, she’d worn and carried the outward symbols of temporal power -- the sceptre and orb, the crown, jewels, sword and robes – just as had the pharaohs, kings, priests and despots of deepest antiquity. The kings of France wore and carried them, too, from the coronation of Clovis in 508 until the last of the Capetian kings was crowned in 1825.
 
The crown jewels of France were finally broken up and sold in 1887, in the hope that “sans couronne, pas besoin de roi”…without a crown, no need for a king. The great “Bleu de France” was cut down to become the Hope Diamond, and can be seen behind thick security glass at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
 
Nevertheless, “la nostalgie du roi,” the longing for the old kings, exercises a continued fascination in France. 
 
“Les Francais ont le goût des princes,” said Charles De Gaulle, “The French have a taste for princes.” 
 
In 1958, De Gaulle pushed for what he described as a “monarchie républicaine” in a new French Constitution that concentrates power in the French executive.

And Emmanuel Macron, now president, commented in a very public interview in 2015 that "Il y a dans le processus démocratique et dans son fonctionnement un absent. Dans la politique française, cet absent est la figure du roi dont je pense fondamentalement que le peuple français n'a pas voulu la mort…” 
 
“There is a missing element in democracy. In France, that missing element is the king whom I believe the French people never truly wished to destroy…”
 
One suspects that le Président Macron, as De Gaulle, would like to fill that void. But poor Macron, heartily detested by the “gilets jaunes” and other major swathes of the French population and as heartily defended by those who elected him, will never capture “la nostalgie du roi.”
 
A king – or a queen -- is not elected. The accident of birth, not political partisanship or an acute lust for power, hands him the crown and sceptre.
 
But perhaps in Queen Elizabeth II the “nostalgie du roi” is, at least momentarily, fulfilled. Her dutiful life was the incarnation of kingship. Always neutral on government and public policy, always detached from party and faction, her power a pure abstraction, rich enough to depend on no favors or services, she belonged only to her subjects.
 
“The Queen did not seek to be loved, she sought respect,” said Stéphane Bern, France’s great promoter of la patrimoine – France’s cultural heritage – in his tribute to Queen Elizabeth.
 
The Queen never complained and except on rare occasions, never explained her actions or her innermost feelings. She never went on Oprah, lost her temper on Twitter, or tried to win friends on Facebook. She gave herself without giving herself away.
 
Reflecting on the Queen’s life and the role of the British monarchy, a French law professor wrote in Le Figaro: “The English model remains a strange thing, rather incomprehensible…but it asks us, we the French, who we are, what we want and what we could do…” 

As the funeral procession wound to a close, and the young naval “ratings” lifted the coffin into the hearse, I imagined I could hear our grandfather nod his head approvingly and say,
 
“She was the Queen.”

Nunc dimittis. 

Her role in life was indeed a strange thing and rather incomprehensible. But, to paraphrase the professor, it asks us to wonder…who we are, what we want, what our own duty might be.

Next week, back at Courtomer, we will be planning a rose garden. It’s only an incomplete answer to the above questions. But it gives us pleasure to think of future generations inspired not only by a love of roses, as we are, but also by the long tradition of French rose-fanciers and their gardens. And of course, we will include the Queen Elizabeth rose!

                           A bientôt au Château,
Elisabeth
                          
P.S. The French are not always relentlessly intellectual or political. Here, Monsieur François Morel interviews an intimate companion of the Queen.

As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your own holiday or special gathering at the Chateau or just to rent the Chateau, the Farmhouse or both. We have just a few openings for this year and 2023, and are taking bookings through 2025. We look forward to hearing from you.