Vale, Pia Regina: Queen Elizabeth II, RIP

John Byron Kuhner pays tribute to Queen Elizabeth II as an exemplar of pietas -- not piety in the strictly religious sense, but dutifulness, after the fashion of Aeneas, hero of Vergil's Aeneid, the epic journey of the founder of Rome from the ashes of Troy.

It is generally acknowledged that the outpouring of respect and admiration for Elizabeth II we have seen in the past days is the result of what we may call her dutifulness. Her personal feelings, caprices, or desires played a relatively minor role in her public life. She did her duty. Even at the very end, she met with and did the work of installing the new prime minister in person -- not, say, by Zoom -- and did it with a smile on her face, even though she was ninety-six and literally two days away from death. Her ill health was no excuse for her not to serve her country as her role expected....

In fact, the great Roman epic, the Aeneid, might almost have been written as a meditation on the Elizabethan regnal style. In the Greco-Roman tradition, epic heroes get their own specific epithet, a verbal descriptor that captures their essence. There is "godlike Achilles" and "wily Odysseus." Aeneas, the Roman hero, gets the hashtag pius. It can mean "pious," but it's less specifically religious than the English word. It's more like "dutiful" or "responsible." In other words, it's exactly the quality Elizabeth has proven so enduringly relevant to our age.

There is some irony in this relevance. Latin teachers have long labored to make Aeneas seem appealing to teens, who often are forced to read the Aeneid as the crowning effort of their Latin studies. The easiest way, in 2022, would probably be to read it with a biography of Queen Elizabeth in parallel.

After being blown off course, Aeneas lands in Carthage, where he falls in love with the beautiful queen Dido. There is a problem, however: she's not leaving, and he's supposed to go to Italy. He can sail off to found his kingdom, or stay and enjoy her love. Elizabeth experienced this same drama in her own family. Her uncle, King Edward VIII, found himself in love with a woman -- a then-married woman who had already been divorced once -- who could not be compatible with his role as king. Edward abdicated, choosing love....

In the first book of the Aeneid, the fleet Aeneas is leading sails into a storm. Most of the ships are lost or destroyed; a small remnant pulls into a harbor. Aeneas makes a brief speech: this suffering will end, with God's help (dabit deus his quoque finem); do not be afraid (maestum timorem mittite); we have a job to do; toughen up, and hold on for better days (durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis). It's the template for all such speeches. Short and forceful, almost every sentence in it became a motto used by some British house at some point or other.

The real kicker, though, is what comes next. "This is what he says aloud," Vergil says; "sick with worry, he feigns a look of hope, and keeps his grief hidden in his heart" (talia voce refert; curisque ingentibus aeger spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem). It was all a show, a facade of optimism such as leadership requires, whether the leader feels it or not. This was an entire public relations policy for Elizabeth. She spoke little -- as Aeneas -- never tried to explain anything away or make light of a situation -- as Aeneas -- and kept her tone hopeful. The propaganda posters her father had put up during the war ("courage, cheerfulness, resolution") used this formula. Her speech during the COVID lockdowns just a few years ago was virtually the same speech, with phrases altered to suit the occasion: "We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again."

C-SPAN will carry live coverage of Queen Elizabeth's state funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday, September 19, 2022, beginning at 4:30 AM Tulsa time. C-SPAN also has video of King Charles III's televised address to the nation, his accession ceremony, and his address in Westminster Hall, among other public statements and events related to the Queen's death.

The BBC has posted three and a half hours of footage of the mourners filing past the Queen lying in state at the Palace of Westminster. Future generations may be more fascinated by the way this video captures, as an accidental documentary, the range of dress and carriage of the British subjects who filed past the coffin than by the significance of the event itself. People seem to have dressed as they normally would for going to work or running errands. Some bowed or curtsied, a few crossed themselves, many merely nodded in the direction of the coffin and strode on. Here are the government's directions to those wishing to pay their last respects.

I am struck by the number of backpacks, which is somewhat surprising given security concerns, but not surprising given that these people have been in line for over 8 hours and have walked 4 or 5 miles, not counting whatever walking they did to reach the end of the queue. It is quite normal in London for people to have backpacks and shopping bags with them at a church service or in a museum or historic site. It's not as though you can drop your bags in the trunk of your car or quickly run them back home if you're a commuter.

During my time in England in 2018, I attended a service at Westminster Abbey led by Charles as Prince of Wales in recognition of the contributions of Christians in the Middle East. Those of us sitting in the nave were in chairs facing the center aisle, and we watched the Prince and a number of prominent religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archimandrite of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, process past us at the start of the service and again at the end. I was in the second row facing the aisle and had a small daypack with me. Someone in the row of chairs on the aisle had a small roll-aboard suitcase under his chair. Everything had been hand-searched outside, before we had been allowed to enter the abbey, and advance tickets were required. I can't imagine anything larger than a small purse to be allowed into a similar service in the US, even with hand-screening.

According to the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, & Sport, as of midnight London time, September 15/16, 2022, the queue for the Queen's lying-in-state stretched for 4.9 miles down the south bank of the Thames, far past the Tower Bridge, and into Southwark Park. They're using YouTube to provide live-streaming updates on the queue's length, queueing time (currently 9 hours), and location of the end of the queue, which is specified to within a 3 meter radius using the What3Words system, currently at navy.noises.overnight, near the Southwark Park tennis courts. Mourners are issued a colored and numbered wristband when joining the queue, making it possible to step away from the line briefly for toilets and refreshments. A bag drop facility on the other side of the Thames is provided for larger bags.

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Samantha Cohen, a 17-year aide to the Queen, shares her memories of the Queen's sense of humor, her Christmas gifts to her staff, her astounding memory for places she'd visited, and her first sight of the queen when Cohen was a schoolgirl at All Hallows in Brisbane, Australia.

Rod Argent of the 1960s band The Zombies remembers two encounters with Queen Elizabeth, once at the 1957 Maundy Thursday service, when he was a 12-year-old chorister at St. Albans Abbey, and he received Maundy money from the Queen and as a performer at the Queen's 60th birthday celebration at Windsor Castle, in the band for a musical specially composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice:

The queen was lovely, and on great form - the whole audience was simply the whole of the extended Royal Family, plus King Hussein! After the performance they all mingled and shared drinks with us, and Prince Edward introduced me to Her Majesty. The queen then spied bass player John Mole, who was unbelievably shy, actually hiding behind the drum kit......she immediately found her way to him - moving drums aside herself (!) - so she could engage him in a personal conversation. Such a considerate and thoughtful action.

UPDATE: At 10:00 a.m. London time on September 16, estimated queueing time was at least 14 hours, and a few minutes later, it was announced "The queue is at capacity and entry is currently paused. Please do not attempt to join until it resumes. Check back for further updates."

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On BBC Radio 4, Edward Stoughton discusses the faith of Queen Elizabeth II. The sacramental nature of the coronation is discussed, beginning with a quote from Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time: "The coronation service is a solemn act of the church by which the Queen enters into a new relation with her people and with God and therefore becomes in some sense a new person herself."

The program included this quote about the Queen's spiritual heritage from Catherine Butcher, coauthor of The Servant Queen and the King She Serves, the only book for which the Queen wrote a forward:

[The Queen's] maternal grandmother was someone who read the Bible to her children for an hour a day, and then the Queen Mother subscribed to Bible Reading Notes and so was someone who regularly read the Bible herself, and she taught her daughters Bible stories and also prayers from the Scottish Psalter. And the first lesson of every week for the Queen and Princess Margaret was reading Scripture for half an hour every week.

In this interview, Catherine Butcher describes her experience in the queue and some details about the regalia at the Queen's lying-in-state and its significance that you won't have seen anywhere else.

Haven Today has two interviews with Catherine Butcher about Queen Elizabeth's faith in Christ, one from the Platinum Jubilee, and one from shortly after the Queen's death.

The year was 1953. Queen Elizabeth II had already succeeded her father, George VI, upon his death in February the year before. On May 1, almost exactly a month before her coronation, the Queen began praying every day and reading private devotions that were specifically written for her by the Archbishop of Canterbury to help her spiritually prepare to become the figurehead of the United Kingdom.

Butcher's book, Our Faithful Queen, which includes some of the devotions from the Archbishop's book for the Queen, is available through Haven Ministries. Alec Gilmore includes some of the meditations from For The Queen : a little book of private devotions in preparation for Her Majesty's Coronation : to be used from first of May to second of June 1953 in this 2013 Diamond Jubilee article in the Church Times. Haven Ministries also has a collection of 10 Surprising Things the Queen Said About Jesus, mainly from her annual Christmas speech to her subjects around the world, which she wrote herself.

The latest edition of Presbycast discusses the relationship between Presbyterians and the Crown and the Queen's personal faith: The Passing of the Presbyterian Queen.

There is a quote circulating as a meme, purporting to be from Queen Elizabeth II, but it is in fact from Queen Victoria, from the book 'Crowned to serve', a coronation welcome to our king and queen, published in 1902 in honor of the coronation of her son, Edward VII. Frederic Farrar, who is quoted, was Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.

Victoria's "Crown."

"I may mention an anecdote as one small illustration of that deep religious feeling which, throughout Queen Victoria's life, manifested itself in the tenderness of her sympathy for all who suffered among her people, and in that vivid sense of duty, directed by remarkable wisdom, which earned for her alone among English sovereigns the title of Victoria 'The Good.' On one occasion one of her chaplains, in preaching before her at Windsor, had made the Second Advent the subject of his discourse. After the sermon the Queen spoke to him on the topic which he had chosen and said:—'Oh how I wish that the Lord might come during my own lifetime!' 'Why,' asked the preacher, 'does your Majesty feel this earnest desire?' 'Oh,' replied the Queen with quivering lips and with her whole countenance lighted by deep emotion, 'I should so love to lay my crown at His feet.' The anecdote illustrates the feelings which dominated the Queen's mind."—Dean Farrar