George Weigel on the legacy of Queen Elizabeth II :
On February 6, Queen Elizabeth II marked her diamond jubilee, an achievement that Great Britain will celebrate throughout 2012. I am not a monarchist, but I’ll happily join in saluting the Queen, who embodies several qualities that are in short supply among 21st-century public figures.
In one of a slew of diamond jubilee books, author Robert Hardman reports that Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is awed by the Queen’s “gravitas.” One hopes it’s catching, even as one hopes that people understand why, as one of Her Majesty’s friends puts it, “she is never, you know, not the Queen.” It’s not a matter of Victorian formality and still less of arrogance. Rather, it’s that the Queen thinks of her unique position as a vocation—a responsibility for which she was consecrated at her coronation on June 2, 1953.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…
