The queen, it is said, would have chosen Scotland to die. How to know? The dreams and desires of Elizabeth II have remained as secret as her opinions, because the most famous personality in the world, with the longest reign in the world after Louis XIV, is all the more exceptional because she is also the one whom the world knew the least. “How we will miss not knowing what she was thinking!” summarizes Tina Brown in the New York Times. The journalist, close to the circles of the royal family, was told that “Her Majesty had made it known discreetly that she hoped to die in Scotland and that to increase her chances, she had extended the time she spent there. The woman who had devoted so much of her life to the service of the state was trying to ensure that her final moments were spent in the most private of her royal estates.”
The certainty is that the queen, entirely confused with her mission as head of state, left nothing to chance. Even her death is a model of mastery, as if she had ticked the boxes of her “to do list”: ceremony in London for its platinum jubilee, reception of Boris Johnson in Scotland for his resignation and of Liz Truss, for her swearing-in. Her last public photo shows her smiling and in a kilt, leaning upright on her cane to extend her hand to the last lady of her government. All the drawers were tidy. The century had come full circle, from its first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, born in 1874, to its 16th and last, Liz Truss, born in 1975. The Queen could go.
Her famous Scottish castle of Balmoral, which one cannot help but hear in French as the place of “not moral”, was on the contrary the one where she liked to be the most. She stayed there for weeks, sometimes months, to meditate in front of the sublime landscapes of the county of Aberdeen, to survey its forests on horseback, to hunt or contemplate the beauty of the deer – to, perhaps, shed the only tear of emotion that filmmaker Stephen Frears, in his film The Queen, gives this queen to whom he lends a heart of stone.
Queen who is not of England died in Scotland
Death in Scotland was part of the planned scenarios, prepared to the millimeter and reviewed by the queen herself. They bore code names taken from a James Bond. Operation “London Bridge” described the entire protocol planned since 1960 by Buckingham Palace, from the death of the sovereign to her funeral. No room was left for improvisation but several scenarios were mentioned depending on the place of death. The one where she would be in Scotland was named “Unicorn”, in reference to the unicorn which appears on the Scottish coat of arms. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his body was first laid to rest at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, transported to St. Giles Cathedral for mass, then to Waverley station and on to London on the royal train. Elizabeth II knew that by dying at Balmoral she was doing the Scots a favor. She knew the details.
The Queen of England did not die in England and she is not Queen of England, contrary to the aberrant appellation attributed to her in France. Never would a Briton pronounce this exclusive term of the three other nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to designate the Queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who is campaigning for independence, has also declared that the monarch will remain head of state of Scotland if the nation separates from London. The queen who is not from England died in Scotland. Affectionately, this is no coincidence.
Politically, it is not either. Scotland, which is of the four nations the one she cherished the most, is both one of the kingdom’s centers of gravity and its weak point. With Northern Ireland, it embodies the current threat of the decomposition of a kingdom whose monarch has the primary mission of guaranteeing unity and union.
The Queen has never allowed herself a political remark, except once: during the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. Without deciding on the secession that she could not approve, she invited the Scots to think “carefully” before voting. Two years later, she said nothing. The Brexit referendum, however, implied the restoration of a border in Ireland, therefore the disunity of the United Kingdom. It would have been his role to prevent it. She preferred his eternal silence. Wrongly.