The news that the Queen had tested positive for Covid must have sent a shiver of dread down the spines of all but a tiny minority of hardhearted Republicans. Most of us don’t want to even imagine a country bereft of the monarch who has been a seemingly immortal part of the fabric of the lives of all but the very old. Yet the brute fact of human mortality means that we will have to face a world without this indomitable 95-year-old woman at some point. How will we cope?
Under the Treason Act of 1351 it was a capital offence to ‘imagine’ the death of a reigning sovereign, but in our time whole departments of state have long not only ‘imagined’ our Queen’s passing, but have planned for it down to the finest detail. Though the Queen has thus far managed to triumphantly defy both the bureaucrats in charge of her funeral arrangements and the Grim Reaper himself, she cannot – as much as we might wish her to – go on forever.
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