I saw a part of the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, on TV, and as usual I was impressed by the way in which in this country we are able to craft carefully ceremonial of one kind or another. We do it well. What I was not prepared for was the way in which the person at the centre of the occasion had become, in a significant sense, a work of art. The “Duke of Edinburgh” at the heart of the celebration was a carefully composed representation of the man.
This comment, I hasten to add, is not an attempt to diminish his stature. Rather I would have preferred it had he been allowed to appear among us as the inhabitant of a rather larger world. It was striking the extent to which any sense of his being part of a wider European history was air-brushed out of the occasion. The most striking aspect of this “editing down” was the complete elimination from the occasion of any reference to members of his wider family, from Germany, who were actually present at the occasion.
The fact that the ceremony was a far more private one than might normally have been the case is understandable in view of the precautions still in force against the spread of the current pandemic. Nevertheless, the hermetic sealing of the occasion within the walls of Windsor Castle and the Royal chapel framed unavoidably the event, and more particularly the person at the heart of it, as being of relatively local significance. Britain looked incontrovertibly inward, and the constructed character at the heart of the picture was drawn with what appeared to be the unqualified intention of showing us the portrait of a man who was (with the momentary qualification of the appearance of a Scottish piper) archetypically English.
The funeral of Prince Philip was without question an impressive work of art, but like all royal portraits it obeyed the narrow rules of its own genre, and I fear that in the process it diminished the man.