Cloud of Witnesses: Elizabeth Windsor

She was the only woman I knew who lived in three centuries, and was the longest-lived English royal when she died on Easter Eve in 2002—a record until her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Gloucester, died at 102. But as do all the children of Adam, she began young, and nursed the wound­ed in the Great War, which took the life of her brother Fergus. Growing up with nine siblings in the Scottish castle of Glamis in Angus, her Jacobite bloodlines never yielded to Calvinism. While circumstances of state blocked roads to Rome, as Queen Mother she restored Canova’s memorial to the Stuart kings in St. Peter’s Basilica, and the apostolic pro-nuncio frequently cooked dinner for her in his residence. The royal eye gazed upon priestesses in the Established Church as physical and metaphysical absurdities.

Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon first shunned marriage to the Duke of York: “Afraid never, never again to be free to think, speak and act as I feel I really ought to.” (She never did make a public speech until her 100th birthday.) Queen Mary lumbered in on her son’s behalf like a bejeweled mastodon, and Elizabeth yielded to the shy, stammering man whose death she would mourn painfully. At the wedding in Westminster Abbey, she placed her bouquet on the grave of the Unknown Soldier, evoking what her father-in-law’s ambassador to Wash­ington wrote for choral rafters: “I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, / Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love . . . .”

The last Queen Empress let none gainsay the benefactions of an empire covering 20 percent of the world’s land surface and one-quarter of the human race who were in her nightly litany. The imperial sunset flushed her quiet disapprobation of Lord Mountbatten’s plans for India. Cold highland hours in trout streams were respite from the lifelong treadmill of public events in crinolines and ostrich feathers, always smiling through migraines and aching feet. Memento mori was a grand proto­col, and each year her funeral was re­hearsed and filmed, with horses in the mock cortege. Drinks flowed as she and the chamberlains fine-tuned an­thems for a proper walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

If the Edwardian lady without an Edwardian hourglass figure resembled an amiable pudding, Hitler called her the most dangerous woman in Europe, and she kept a pistol in her purse, ready for an invasion. In later years came elegant vagueness. When Princess II­leana of Romania, who had become an Orthodox nun, came to break­fast, she thought she was the Queen of Holland. With more than 50 per­sonal servants to the last, her virtues did not include domestic economies.

I was first presented to her at Clar­ence House in 1967 by Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames, whose loveli­ness, though a remote radiance in the perspective of my youth, dazzled me out of adolescence. On another occa­sion, we had tea with a sour Krishna Menon who had been voted out of the Indian parliament and did not share the tradition of smiling come what may. At Clarence House, those of my age were given sherry by the same footman who served the queen gin. Standing by a bed of camellias she told me to look up, and soon hovering over us was a purple helicopter with Margaret flash­ing a beacon to Mother.

More than a million attended her funeral, and in repose she played her part well. Almost 80 years after her wedding the flowers from her coffin were removed and placed on the grave of the Unknown Soldier.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago, / Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know, / We may not count her armies, we may not see her King, / Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suf­fering, /And soul by soul and silently her shin­ing bounds increase, / And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Author

  • Fr. George W. Rutler

    Fr. George W. Rutler is a contributing editor to Crisis and pastor of St. Michael's church in New York City. A four-volume anthology of his best spiritual writings, A Year with Fr. Rutler, is available now from the Sophia Institute Press.

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