The Queen and I - Commentary

I never met Queen Elizabeth II, even though I was born and grew up in London, England. The closest I got was the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, about half an hour after the Royal Wedding – that’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana. So I’m hardly qualified to comment on what sort of person she was and whether she should be mourned. But the reactions to her death and the undercurrent of expectations of her heir do seem somewhat sinister to me.

I grew up in the UK at a time when environmentalism was just finding its feet. We laughed, rather nervously, at the predictions of London being underwater by the year 2000. We learned to recycle paper and the color green acquired a new symbolism. No one overtly connected the new movement with the Luddites we were taught about in history class; the Green movement was all about the future and moving away from the grim and terrible past.

Then-Prince Charles was an early devotee of the Green movement which seemed rather incongruous given his wealth and lifestyle, but his earnestness did appear genuine, to the younger generation at least. Where was the Queen on all this? I have no idea, and I doubt anyone outside her immediate circle does either.

But that was the point about the Queen, and about the British monarchy in general. A British monarch is supposed to be apolitical, above the fray, silently acquiescing to the will of the electorate and ensuring that it is implemented. The Queen was no absolute monarch; in fact, in many ways, she had less practical power than many of her subjects. Thus, to blame her for her country’s imperial past is bizarre. It also fails to consider that the British Empire became what it was because it was supported by the British People.

Strange though it may seem today for a Western power, the British were once proud of their global status and reach. Phrases such as the “White Man’s Burden” were not merely propaganda to feed the masses but a genuine expression of the missionary spirit, of the self-sacrifice of those who went out to punishing places like Rhodesia, India, and Kenya in order to bring culture, Christianity, and modernity to the natives. Yes, there were material gains. Maybe they were even the overriding motivation. But imperialism was not a monstrosity imposed by royal fiat on British serfs forced to march as Roman soldiers once did, to sit as galley slaves and sail abroad in order to conquer the world. Queen Elizabeth II was upholding the will of the British People as expressed through Parliament when she traveled abroad to visit the UK’s dominions.

Did she look at the dark-skinned natives with scorn and contempt? None of the photographic evidence nor the first-person accounts suggest this. Do all those now heaping scorn upon her as an evil imperialist truly believe that she was to blame for all the admitted ills that accompanied imperialism? Certainly there are idiots among them. But they are useful idiots – the question is: Who is using them?

Is all the furor aroused over the mother perhaps designed only to lend an aura of magnificent futurism, fairness, even wokeism to the son? And who is this son anyway?

“I have long believed we need a shift in our economic model that places nature and the world’s transition to net-zero at the heart of how we operate.”

This is taken from the then-Prince of Wales’ speech to the Green Horizon Summit in 2020. The Summit is a World Economic Forum project, and Charles has been intimately linked with the WEF for years; the WEF’s website in fact notes, “The Great Reset [was] launched by World Economic Forum and HRH The Prince of Wales.”

Though it may be naïve to see the Queen as the servant of her UK subjects, dedicating her life to doing her duty, this perception, shared by millions, perhaps says more about those subjects than it does about their sovereign. Those who mourn Queen Elizabeth II do so because they value the notion of service and have resolved to perceive this woman as its embodiment. Are those who refuse to mourn simply incapable of doing so because they have no concept of what serving actually means?

King Charles III may declare his intention to “serve” as his mother did, but the very fact that he is associated with ideas and beliefs of his own will most certainly influence his notion of what service entails. Whom will he be serving when he promotes his own pet causes? Will he even care whether he is serving a majority of his subjects, or will his reign be not one looking to a future of diminished royal power, but rather a harking back to the times of his namesakes who knew what it really meant to rule?