TIM COSTELLO, a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, reflects on his mixed responses to the passing of Queen Elizabeth II…
Melbourne, Australia
The strongest word echoing after the Queen’s death in the tsunami of coverage and commentary is the word duty. She did her duty. Other words like humility, patience, humour and love are abundant – but duty is dominant.
If anyone had a right to abdicate, retire and put her feet up to enjoy her last twenty years pursuing private pleasures it was the Queen. But she remained steadfast in performing her duties until the very end. I suspect that in those last days at Balmoral she must have known she was dying but still she got up and dressed and stood to receive Boris Johnston’s resignation and to swear-in the new PM Liz Truss. It was public service, not private interest, until her very last breath.
An image of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is illuminated on the sail of Sydney Opera House, following the Queen’s passing, in Sydney, Australia, on 9th September. PICTURE: Reuters/Jaimi Joy/File photo.
The outpouring of grief has unified us and, boy, do we need some unity in this present world.
Grief that is real as I felt I had lost a grandmother – a mighty rock who as a child I swore allegiance to. In the 1960’s every Monday at my school assembly in Melbourne we raised the flag looked on her picture and sang God Save The Queen. I never met her but I felt she was my Queen even though I am a republican by conviction.
“Here’s the rub – paradoxically I am grieving the end of her reign over my country when I do not agree she should be reigning over my country. The sense of being unified under her and belonging to something bigger than just my nation may be more real to me than I had thought.”
I want to introduce another word – paradox. There is a paradox that I cannot resolve as I fervently believe that an Australian, not an English-born UK resident like the Queen, should be our head of state.
In my mind I think giving money, castles, titles and power to a foreigner and their heirs to perpetually reign over Australia makes no sense. And she reigns over another 14 nations besides ours.
Here’s the rub – paradoxically I am grieving the end of her reign over my country when I do not agree she should be reigning over my country. The sense of being unified under her and belonging to something bigger than just my nation may be more real to me than I had thought.
Many of our Indigenous leaders are caught in this paradox. I saw Pat Dodson, one of our finest Aboriginal leaders, moved to tears when relating how he and other Aboriginal leaders went to Buckingham Palace in 1999 to protest their dispossession by the British Crown. Loss of land, loss of rights, loss of children and terrible misery had followed this act of dispossession when a flag was raised in 1770 declaring they were subjects of someone they had never met. They thought the Queen would give them a cursory 15 minutes but she took them and their claims seriously. So seriously that Dodson, through tears, said she treated them as humans which they had not experienced from our own politicians.
I am also a Baptist and my forebears in the UK went to prison or fled to The Netherlands to escape the religious intolerance from the church her forebears headed. And which the Queen headed for 70 years. Dissenters like Baptists wanted to worship according to their consciences, not the rites of the state church, but since this spelled disunity the King, as head of the Church of England, enforced unity through religious persecution.
Persecution of difference was enshrined in law as the Act of Uniformity of 1662. Pilgrim Fathers fled to Massachusetts Bay and John Bunyan, a Baptist preacher imprisoned for religious conscience sake in a Bedford prison, wrote the spiritual classic Pilgrim’s Progress.
The paradox was evident in King Charles III’s first tribute speech to his mother’s memory. He spoke of the role and duties in the sovereign’s particular responsibility towards the Church of England (the State Church) but then went on to dedicate himself to serving those over whom he reigns, whatever their background and beliefs.
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Is he the defender of one faith or faiths? This is a remarkable shift when you remember that the State Church not so long ago enforced its religious rules. The Queen’s uncle, Edward VIII, had to abdicate the throne rather than marry a divorcee he loved. Charles’ mother, as Queen and head of the Church of England, did not attend his civil wedding to Camilla but did go to host the reception. Freedom of conscience in matters of faith has paradoxically flourished under Elizabeth as head and chief enforcer of the Church of England whilst maintaining at least lip service to the religious duties and rules. But the change is dramatic – a divorcee is now on the throne and head of the Church of England.
Yet all the religious intertwining of sovereignty remains. The first proclamation of Charles as King was in Friary Court in St James’s Palace, London, with reference to our “liege Lord Charles” under God. The tradition is that, like his mother, he will be anointed under a canopy with sacred oils in the Church of England’s Westminster Abbey, a ceremony redolent of God’s sacred anointing according to religious rites.
All very strange to secular ears and a particular threat in past generations to dissenters like Baptists, free thinkers and Jews. But this is religious medieval tradition, more than just pageantry and pomp, vibrantly alive in 2022. It speaks to us of the power that comes from God and the call of God to serve others and to do one’s duty in an age of self-interest and indulgence. That, too, is a paradox. And it is quite profound.
Tim Costello is a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He is also a Sight Advisory Board member.
