I’m reading A Voyage Around the Queen, by Craig Brown, a quirky kaleidoscopic peek at Queen Elizabeth, with such insights as: “The first biography of Princess Elizabeth appeared in November 1930, when she was four years old.”1 Or about her granddad, George V, not known for his effusive compassion. In 1898, at the formal launching of a ship, a platform collapsed, and 200 spectators were swept into the water. “Writing up his diary that evening, King George V mentioned the incident, but only as an afterthought. ‘I am afraid over 30 were drowned. Got home at 4:15.’ ”2
What moved me, though, was Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. All the robes, all the barons, all the counts and countesses, the bedecked clergymen, the crown, the trumpets, the violins, the world watching (Jacqueline Bouvier, soon to be a Kennedy, covered it for an American newspaper)—it was heavy-laden with aristocratic traditions that were already crusted over when western Pennsylvania was still the American frontier. (In America those watching the event felt jilted when NBC interrupted the festivities with a commercial starring J. Fred Muggs, a chimpanzee.)
Yet Elizabeth is now as stone-cold dead as the ancestors interred with her —including Charles I, whose subjects chopped off his head (Charles III likely won’t go that way). You’re the queen of England, and then you’re dead. That’s just how it goes.
Our existence is so vaporous, so fleeting, that in the big picture it’s as if we’re mere images … Nothing more.
The book also talked about how the royals have fared at Madame Tussauds in London. Elizabeth had 24 different waxwork versions of her, the first when she was 2. Though all her children had been on display, all were melted down and reshaped into others (perhaps some went into Miley Cyrus?)—except Charles III, who remains, along with Camilla and the duke and duchess of York. Prince Andrew has long been gone. Harry? Present but “standing at a discreet distance from the other four.”3 Meghan was there (alongside Kim Kardashian). Princess Diana took up space in a corner, with a plaque telling the new generation just who she was, anyway. I get it. (I recently told some 25-year-old that I hated my voice because I sound like Woody Allen on steroids, and he asked, “Who?”)
Another monarch (predating Elizabeth a bit) expressed his thoughts about earthly accomplishments and honors. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2). The Hebrew word for vanity means vapor or breath. Our existence is so vaporous (James 4:14), so fleeting, that in the big picture it’s as if we’re mere images in a dream forgotten, nothing more.
And we would be but for the God who knows every hair on our head (Luke 12:7) and who,by His death, proved how much we, as souls to be saved, do matter. Sure, some terrestrial trappings—e.g., coronations, wax effigies to be oohed and aahed at, whatever—have their place, but they’re such small places and so fleeting, too.
“For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:18). Not sure what it means, but in this context it seems worth remembering.
1 Craig Q. Brown, A Voyage Around the Queen, Kindle Edition (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), p. 31.
2 Ibid., p. 15.
3 Ibid., p. 31.
