Britain Wakes Up Without Queen Elizabeth II
After a long, arid summer in Britain, during which the green expanses of London’s Royal Parks became bleached and desiccated, the first week of September brought a sudden change in the season, with the onset of heavy downpours by day, and nights rent by thunderstorms. On the morning after the Queen died, the pavement of Constitution Hill, the road that leads from Hyde Park Corner to Buckingham Palace, was smeared with sodden leaf-fall, trampled to a rusty mush by the crowds who lined up to lay bouquets at the wrought-iron gates beneath the Union Jack fluttering at half-staff. The scent of autumn was newly in the air—a palpable shift of pressure, a sense of something broken open after a long season of waiting.
All the previous afternoon it had been clear what was coming, as soon as a BBC news presenter appeared onscreen shortly after lunchtime with the news that doctors tending to the Queen at Balmoral Castle, her summer home in Scotland, were concerned for her condition. In a short while, it was reported that members of the Royal Family were making their way to be at her bedside, with television cameras trained upon the misty runway of Aberdeen airport. Huw Edwards, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship news program, took to the airwaves dressed in a dark suit and a black tie, a look that a responsible newsman doesn’t adopt lightly. When, just after six-thirty, Edwards sombrely relayed a statement from Buckingham Palace announcing that the Queen had died peacefully that afternoon, the shock lay not so much in that long-anticipated bulletin but in the titular formulation that followed in the next breath: “The King and the Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.” Seamlessly, the nation shifted from one reign to the next.
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