Amidst the super-abundance of commentary triggered by the epoch ending event at Balmoral is guidance about how to talk to your child about the Queen's death, by way of just one example here are the tips shared by Save the Children. It may be that my children are anomalously morbid but I've found that they already have an intense interest in death and it's a fascination completely shorn of the euphemism with which many adult Brits seek to blur the edges of death's finality. She is not asleep, she is not passed, she is dead. Speaking for myself, at least, this is not a difficult or hard conversation. A much more interesting conversation is how to talk to your child about the Queen. Or, to be more precise, how to talk to them about monarchy.
My 5 year old is very keen on dressing up as a pirate and wears his costume, eyepatch and plumed tricorn hat my mother bought in Venice many years ago, in public with exactly the unabashed lack of self-consciousness that is one of the chief delights of children. The pirate costume is matched only in popularity by his king outfit complete with sword, robe and a paper crown of his own design. I will forbear from observing that perhaps plunder is the theme that both costumes have in common.
Even very small children seem to get the concept of kings and there can't be many American kids that haven't watched the Lion King. To my mind one of the lessons and markers of adulthood is realising that there is no normal there is only your normal. And in Britain our normal is monarchy. It's hard to assess quite how many people would prefer that was not so but it would be idle to pretend that everyone here is content to be a subject.
We can only imagine what normal is like for children in countries like North Korea or Russia. Countries without monarchs but the kind of leaders whose exercise of power would have been familiar to and even envied by some English kings past. As it happens I don't find it especially problematic explaining how British parliamentary democracy works to my children and the concept of a figurehead that symbolises power but can't wield it.
What is more nuanced and thorny is this. I believe that all humans are born alike in dignity and value and I want my children to believe that too. Money, beauty, power and celebrity all conspire to assail that belief and it is very, very easy to have one's head turned by any or all of those things. A king is only a king when sufficient people recognise him as such. One of the more entertaining and absurd Instagram accounts is Royals Without Throne (sic). Because a king without a crown or a throne isn't really a king he's just a person. But then a king with a crown and a throne is also just a person.
One of the things I have always wondered about the Queen is what it must be like to live an entire life in which every single person she met would be reconciling, sometimes not very successfully I am sure, her personhood with her status. And also what it must have been like never to have experienced that frisson of excitement that all but the most determined republicans felt upon getting to meet her. Better by birth is an abhorrent concept but there was a quality that the Queen possessed that was almost superhuman and that was her reticence and circumspection. Opinions are free and all should be free to share them but not her.
There's an ironic tension in the fact that so many were willing to accept and treat the Queen as special and yet had she exhibited a belief on her part that she was special that willingness would have withered long ago. You don't need to be a queen to have immaculate manners but we were fortunate in having a queen whose manners were absolutely beyond reproach. At the heart of good manners is the biblical maxim of treating others as you would wish to be treated.
So maybe the key to kinghood is don't consider yourself a king no matter how ardently and vociferously those around you insist upon it. Monarchy or not I have no problem in telling my children that nobody is better than them and they are better than nobody.
