By David Free
Queen Elizabeth II meets legendary guitarists (L-R) Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Brian May at Buckingham Palace in 2005.Credit:Getty
In 1977, the English poet Philip Larkin was commissioned to write a short poem to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee. Larkin wrote:
In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
She did not change.
The penultimate line was the result of a late alteration. Larkin had originally written: “We had one constant good”. At the last moment, he crossed out “We had” and wrote “There was”.
Larkin didn’t think much of his jubilee poem. In a way, you can see why. The first two lines are a bit arbitrary, especially if you don’t share Larkin’s sense that all change is bad and that the world has been generally going down the toilet since 1952.
But the poem’s clinching two lines are what poetry is for. In nine simple words, Larkin totally hit the bullseye about Queen Elizabeth II. Since her death, his words have only come to feel more right. She did not change. These days it’s rare to find a proposition we can all agree with. But we all seem to agree about that.
This is why Larkin’s last-minute revision of the poem was crucial. Just in time, he registered the key point that the Queen’s constancy was no mere matter of opinion. It was not – or not just – a matter of what “we had”. It existed beyond us. It was an objective fact. There was one constant good: she did not change.
Not all the tributes paid to her majesty in 1977 were as respectful as Larkin’s. The Sex Pistols marked the silver jubilee by releasing the scandalous God Save the Queen. At the start of each verse, Johnny Rotten snarled the titular phrase. As the song proceeded, he was therefore obliged to find a succession of different rhymes for “Queen”. In the first verse he went for the snappy and controversial “Her fascist regime”. In the second verse he went with “She ain’t no human bein’”. Finally, he opted for the anticlimactic “We mean it, man”.
The Sex Pistols outside Buckingham Palace in 1978.Credit:Getty
The Queen outlived many things and people during her 70-year reign. Among the things she outlasted were punk and the wrath of Johnny Rotten. In 2017, having long since rebranded himself as John Lydon, the ex-Pistol made it clear that he’d never had any beef with the Queen personally.
“That’s a human being,” he said, “and I would sorely miss her as a human being on Planet Earth.” Last week, Lydon proved this by swiftly paying his respects when news of the Queen’s death broke. “Rest in Peace, Queen Elizabeth II,” he tweeted. “Send her victorious.”
Over time, then, Lydon recanted his charge that the Queen was no human bein’. But there’s a sense in which that claim was not too far off the mark. The Queen was certainly no normal human being. Her single-minded commitment to duty was downright creepy. It was more superhuman than human.
This is why every thinking person admired her, and no thinking person envied her. Elizabeth was 10 when her father unexpectedly inherited the throne from her feckless, Nazi-sympathising uncle. “Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?” Elizabeth’s little sister Margaret asked her. Elizabeth said it probably did. “Poor you,” Margaret said. Their grandmother noticed that Elizabeth began “praying ardently for a brother” at this point because the appearance of a male heir was the only thing that would now save her.
But no brother materialised. On her 21st birthday, Elizabeth made a solemn public pledge: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.”
Lots of people make such far-fetched promises without intending to keep them. Elizabeth meant exactly what she said. This was selflessness in a radically literal sense. Her devotion to duty would be so total that she would effectively have no self.
Five years later, she became Queen. Fittingly, she didn’t look happy at her coronation. Happiness would have been inappropriate, given how diligently she intended to do her job. The prospect of living a normal life – a life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of boredom – was off the table forever.
Philip Larkin’s best friend, the novelist Kingsley Amis, had lunch with the Queen once. For days beforehand, Amis strictly avoided eating beans and onions, to reduce the risk that he would fart or belch in the royal presence. In the event, he didn’t, and the occasion went smoothly.
When the topic of books came up, the Queen confessed that she had no time to read for pleasure. “So much of my work is reading,” she said. Amis named some of his favourite English authors. When he mentioned Dick Francis, the Queen’s ears pricked up. “Oh yes, Mummy’s jockey,” she said. It was true: Francis had ridden horses for the Queen Mother before turning his hand to thriller writing.
English poet Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985) with Monica Jones at Westminster Abbey in 1984.Credit:Getty
Kingsley’s son Martin has a lower opinion of the royal family than his father did. “They’re philistines,” he declared, after meeting the Queen and Prince Philip. The Prince had distinguished himself by having no idea that Amis was a writer. As for the Queen, Amis had tried to break the ice by mentioning that she had knighted his father. “Her only reaction was to look far away, vaguely staring at a painting on the wall,” the novelist recalled. “The problem is, the Queen doesn’t listen to what you say …”
Possibly, Amis should have spared a thought for the Queen here. Such meetings can’t have been too thrilling for her, either, and she had to be present at all of them, not just one of them. On a daily basis, she had to attend gatherings and cultural events that most of us would crawl over half a mile of broken glass to avoid just once. Nor did she have the option of quitting. Her uncle had done that, and he’d almost destroyed the monarchy.
Of course, we’ll never know for sure what it was like to be her; the Queen was scrupulous about keeping her opinions to herself. But as Amis found, her body language occasionally gave things away.
For example, we can safely infer that she was not into the electric guitar. In 2005, at Buckingham Palace, the Queen was introduced to four English masters of that instrument: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Brian May and Jimmy Page.
The encounter was filmed, and the footage is notoriously excruciating. For maximum comic effect, it should be watched in full on YouTube. But the gist of it is that the Queen didn’t have the faintest idea who these tuxed, nervous-looking legends of the axe were.
Writer Kingsley Amis in 1985.Credit:Getty
May was first in line. After a cursory chat with him, the Queen moved along the line to Page.
“And are you also a … ?” the Queen said, before trailing off in a way that made it painfully clear that she a) didn’t have a clue who Page was; and b) had paid such minimal attention to May that she didn’t even know the word she was after was “guitarist”.
“I’m a guitarist as well, yes,” the composer of Stairway to Heaven tactfully replied, supplying information that he probably hadn’t been called on to supply for about three decades.
Clapton was next in line. Having watched the Page fiasco unfold, he tried to avert a similar bin fire by loudly announcing his own name up front.
“You’ve been playing quite a long time, haven’t you?” the Queen rejoined. Conceivably this meant she had caught Clapton’s name and was familiar with it. Slightly more conceivably, it didn’t.
Nor did Jeff Beck get much joy out of her. Maybe she thought he was Johnny Rotten.
Queen Elizabeth II (L) speaks with British actor Christopher Lee in 2015.
“It was great to meet her and it doesn’t matter at all that she didn’t know who we are or what we do,” Clapton said later. “I wouldn’t expect her to.”
This was surely the right way to look at it. After all, they were the ones getting to meet her; she wasn’t the one getting to meet them. They were there of their own free will. She wasn’t. Since birth, she had rarely done anything of her own free will.
Just as she’d never had enough me-time to read books, she’d never had much chance to get the Led out, or immerse herself in the 15-minute jazz-rock odysseys of Jeff Beck. That wasn’t what she’d been put on Earth to do, so she didn’t do it.
Hence she didn’t look at all embarrassed when she met a subject whose body of work she was unfamiliar with. Not knowing who Martin Amis and Jimmy Page were wasn’t a failure on her part. It was a measure of her success – a measure of how thoroughly she had spent her life being an institution, rather than a person.
She did not change. The Queen had been on the throne for 25 years when Larkin wrote that. She remained on it for another 45. Over all those years, she did nothing that proved Larkin’s line false. The observation that she didn’t change kept getting truer over time.
In fact, she was so uncannily good at not changing, her reign can be viewed as the ultimate argument against a hereditary monarchy. To be that good at being an institution, you must be an extraordinarily selfless human being. But by definition, most human beings are not extraordinarily selfless.
None of us who are alive now will ever see another monarch do the job so well, let alone for so long.
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