Editor’s Note: Rosa Prince is editor of The House magazine. She is the former assistant political editor of The Daily Telegraph and author of the books “Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister” and “Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
London
CNN
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It was a service for a great Queen, a world leader whose long shadow loomed over our age – and at the same time a moving, almost intimate tribute to a beloved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.
A funeral of pomp and splendor for Queen Elizabeth II brought Britain to a standstill. It prompted 100 heads of state to travel to London – joining a 2,000-strong congregation in Westminster Abbey – and inspired millions around the world to pause and watch the ceremonies for a departed sovereign unfold.
With the late Queen now interred beside her husband, Prince Philip, in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, Britain closes a chapter on its past, a farewell to members of the wartime generation that saw this country’s finest hour, encapsulating as they did the spirit of 1940, when Britain stood alone against fascism, undaunted and unbowed.
The abbey’s tenor bell tolled 96 times as the dignitaries arrived, one for every year of the monarch’s life, a tally that for her subjects was far more than a number.
Her seven decades on the throne meant only the most elderly could remember an era before the age of Elizabeth. Yet the passing of a woman who had achieved such longevity meant the funeral was marked by respect and awe rather than tragedy; there was none of the raw grief that accompanied the death of her former daughter-in-law Princess Diana, who lost her life in shocking circumstances a quarter century earlier almost to the day, in a mangled wreck of a car in a Paris underpass, aged 36.
There has been an air of trepidation to the 10 days of mourning for the Queen, spurred by two questions: What will the future hold under King Charles III, and what does his mother’s departure mean for Britain’s place in the world?
Queen Elizabeth II inherited from her father, King George VI, a country that still claimed an empire, with 70 territories across the globe. For all that she oversaw a…
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