1992: Alice Mallard
The Queen’s Speech
Queen Elizabeth II has famously described the year 1992 as her Annus Horribilis—a horrible year—in a speech marking her fortieth anniversary on the throne. Her error in judgement is profound and cannot be dismissed as a mere lapse of phrasing, nor passed off with a titter of amusement.
True, the laughter it occasioned led me to recall my mother’s remark on the etymology of sovereign—that it derives from superanus, meaning, as she so enjoyed pointing out, a “superior bum-hole.” Yet beyond the childish giggle lay something far less amusing. The Queen had spoken Latin to the nation. Had her words been merely written, their hauteur might have been softened by the page. Spoken aloud, they sounded like a revelation of how little she understood the distance between her world and ours.
For while she may well have been having an unpleasant year, her definition of unpleasantness must differ somewhat from that of the unwashed and uneducated masses. Her father, too, revealed a similar misstep in empathy during the war, when consoling a Londoner whose house had been bombed. “My house too has been hit,” he offered. The rejoinder—“which one?”—remains the definitive reply to all royal attempts at identification.
That she spoke of herself at all was the true shock. No properly raised lady, least of all a queen, would dream of making her private feelings so public. Decorum requires opacity. A monarch’s sufferings, like her jewels, must be worn without explanation. If she felt obliged to speak, why not celebrate her anniversary, or the durability of her realm, or the quiet stoicism of her subjects?
Instead, she descended from her plinth and invited sympathy. She wished to be seen as one of us—while addressing us in a dead language few of us understood. There is, in that gesture, the whole tragedy of royalty in the modern age: the desire to appear human while remaining divine.
Or, to borrow my mother’s phrasing, a sovereign who forgets what she sits upon risks reminding everyone else.
You are here: States of Grace > Philosophy