Farewell To An Icon And An Era.(Queen Mother)(Brief Article)(Obituary)

Britain's Queen Mother was a piece of the ancient past, and she reveled in the role. She predated the modern monarchy, and was allowed to remain locked in a different era. That was the whole point of her: to remind the people that an institution they no longer revere had, once upon a time, enjoyed respect bordering on worship. She was the last embodiment anyone will ever see of royalty as it used to be: grand, remote, demanding and contemptuous of anything that might be called accountability to the public--least of all to the media, the enemy that dogs the footsteps of all her heirs and successors.

It is a bit of a myth to say that she was loved. She became an icon to whom it was customary to apply that term, but the affection was a ritual. She was known, without rancor, for her little foibles: her amazing extravagance, her reactionary attitudes, her fondness for a tipple. In any other member of the royal family, these traits would have been critically deconstructed. But the Queen Mum was sanctified as a national treasure. She grew so old that the preparations for her death became indecently explicit: the BBC's fabled rehearsals for the great moment, the black ties in every news anchor's desk drawer, the obituary sound bites that politicians kept on the databases. In that sense, too, she transcended common humanity.

For the older generation of Brits, she was a reassuring figure. They, like her, could remember the days when royalty retained an unchallenged place in British life. They remembered the circumstances in which the job of queen was thrust upon her, when her brother-in-law, Edward VIII, abdicated to his own self-indulgence. They witnessed her performance during World War II, when she bravely offered comfort to the victims of Hitler's bombs. This was still the period when such gestures took on an otherworldly quality, with the monarch and his consort descending from on high to move among their people. Because the Queen Mother never did change, staying faithful to her hats and pastel dresses, her horse- racing friends and her sweet-faced rejection of the slightest intrusion into her privacy, she still had millions of mostly elderly admirers when she died. As the last such royal, she now leaves the monarchy exposed. As long as she lived, there was at least one firewall against an all-out critique. Somehow it seemed indecent to attack too fiercely an institution of which this unnaturally durable ...