Queen Elizabeth kept her opinions to herself and quietly cleaned up the mess. (Photo by Annice Lyn/Getty Images)
I wasn’t expecting to feel this way.
My views on the royal family tend not to be positive ones. There has been little to love over the past few decades. Scandals. Prejudice. Selfishness. Entitlement. Arrogance. Adultery. Sexual predation. Boorish-ness. It has been a smorgasbord of disappointments.
But when one gives it a little thought, there was a member of the Windsor family who was not present when the family was indulging in reprehensible behaviour.
When the Windsor orgies of embarrassment, self-indulgence and idiocy were making Game of Thrones look restrained and dignified, Elizabeth was never involved. In fact, she was generally only involved in the clean-up afterwards, quietly helping scrub the vomit off the sofa, wiping the blood off the curtains and fishing the dead cat out of the swimming pool. And then making a brief and dignified statement.
Her children must have been the most disappointing since Suharto’s son Tommy murdered the supreme court judge investigating him for corruption while his sister sold the Indonesian national electricity provider to Russia.
She deserved much better than them, and I can’t help thinking that I’d have done a better job than they did.
Because that is what being a Windsor is.
It’s a job. Elizabeth knew that. Now that she is gone, and one’s republican emotions are tempered, her speech (much played on CNN right now) given in Cape Town on her 21st birthday immediately after the death of her beloved father, is almost unbearably touching.
“I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.”
Because the job is about service. It is a very well-paid job. But it involves work. As well as the simple requirement that you have some children and do not commit adultery or cause a scene. That’s the job. A job at which her children failed in a variety of ways — only some of which involve Velcro, power tools and sex workers.
While everyone around her was cheating on her with showgirls, having affairs, sun tanning topless, preying on underage women and generating as much bad press as a Robert Mugabe sleepover at the Playboy Mansion, she was getting on with the job.
Which she did quietly and gracefully. She may not have got everything right, but I do know that she got fewer things wrong than most of us.
Because, as she said in that speech as a 21-year-old, she was committed to service. She committed her whole life to service. And in that way, she was an example for us all. I wish that I had done the same with my life. And if I’d inherited that much money I might have been able to. Or I might have been a worthless disgrace. It’s hard to say.
What is interesting is how the younger Windsors have turned their backs on the poor behaviour of the Andrew generation. Perhaps, like many children growing up in dysfunctional families, they value discipline and stability highly. They seem far more Elizabeth than Epstein.
How often she must have wanted to give her opinion, fight back against criticism she felt was unfair or have her say. But she didn’t. She kept quiet, did her best and got on with things. Even during the grossly unfair way she was pilloried after the death of Diana during what Boris Johnson (in one of the few accurate statements of his political life) referred to as an outburst of “Latin American peasant hagiolatry”.
As a result numerous polls over numerous decades consistently showed her to be one of the most respected figures on the planet.
And now she is gone.
When I was going through a less than optimal Book of Job period of my life, I remembered a quote from a letter written to his parents by a British soldier hours before being killed on the Western Front. In it, he said that he “just hoped when it’s all over I hope that I can say I did a good job”.
Ultimately in life, that is all any of us can hope for. That, given the circumstances we are born into and we find ourselves in, we do a good job.
And she did.
RIP ma’am.
John Davenport is the chief creative officer of Havas Southern Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.