LBC Views: Five Days Scotland will never forget

13 September 2022, 17:08

LBC Views: Five days Scotland will never forget
LBC Views: Five days Scotland will never forget. Picture: Global
Gina Davidson

By Gina Davidson

These are days Scotland is unlikely to ever witness again.

Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Scots, has left the country she held so close to her heart for the last time; her coffin being flown out of Edinburgh to London after she lay in rest in St Giles Cathedral for 24 hours after arriving in Scotland’s capital following a 175-mile journey from Balmoral, her haven in rural Aberdeenshire.

The tens of thousands of people who queued all night in the cold and dark of Edinburgh’s Meadows to be able to file past her oak coffin, draped in the Scottish Royal standard, in the echoing quiet of the cavernous Cathedral, have dispersed.

The tens of thousands who lined the Royal Mile to watch her passage from the Palace of Holyroodhouse are also now gone.Just the mounds of flowers laid outside the Palace are left in commemoration.

But will that spirit which compelled so many to turn out to pay their respects to the Monarch, dissipate as quickly or has it reignited support for the royals in Scotland?

In the days since the announcement of her death was pinned to the wrought iron Abbey Strand gate, the outpouring of quiet, respectful grief from Scots of all ages, all creeds, has been a phenomenon most would never have predicted.

You have to go back to 1543 when a Monarch last died in Scotland. Like Queen Elizabeth, King James V’s funeral cortege came to Edinburgh – his from Falkland Palace – his coffin carried through the cobbled streets to his grave at Holyrood.

All of that was 60 years before the Union of the Crowns – a union, which has down the centuries felt increasingly irrelevant to many Scots, with the Queen and her family painted as a purely English institution, somehow removed from Scotland, no matter how many holidays they spent at Balmoral.

To add to that, despite its long history of being ruled by royals, Scotland likes to think of itself as a country of Jock Tamson’s bairns, a place where an ‘I kent yer faither’ attitude brings back to earth anyone considered to be getting above themselves, a place where pomp and circumstance are eschewed, where democracy is prized more highly than monarchy.

Ironically perhaps that’s why the Queen loved being here, she was just one of those bairns too.

Without doubt there’s a republican streak in Scotland. A poll by the British Future thinktank, taken just prior to the Platinum Jubilee, found that only 45 per cent of Scots wanted to retain the monarchy – with 36 per cent saying the end of the Queen’s reign would be the right moment for a republic to be established.

And yet, the thousands on the streets of Edinburgh – and all those who lined parts of the funeral cortege route from Balmoral on Sunday would suggest an underlying support for the royal family that pollsters have perhaps not reached.

Maybe these are the same people whose quiet pro-UK views were ignored by those convinced of a Yes victory in the independence referendum back in 2014; the people who voted No and kept the UK together.

Maybe these are quiet monarchists who saw value in the Queen, and who now perhaps will transfer that allegiance to the new King Charles; who see the royal family as a strong thread holding the disparate parts of the UK together, who want that stability and constance the Queen embodied.

Certainly, these are the type of people that Nicola Sturgeon knows she needs to convince if she’s to achieve her aim of independence.

She has found herself in the last few days criticised by many in the independence movement, some ridiculously suggesting she should not have carried out her duties as First Minister, Privy Councillor and Keeper of the Seal, in signing accession documents for the new King, others finding her full-throated support for him, her singing of God Save the King, and her personal emotional reminisces of the time she spent with the Queen, hard to stomach.

At the same time her solemn, sombre actions have won praise from those who would otherwise choose to find fault with her Scottish nationalism.

Of course, the SNP has long held the policy that the monarch would be retained in an independent Scotland, and there will be many in the independence movement who agree.

However, there are as many, if not more, who would not want a hereditary monarch at the helm.

One of those being Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens who spoke at the Scottish Parliament’s Motion of Condolence, determinedly un-deferential in front of the new King, and calling for a redoubling of societal change – though he did not go so far as to say change which would see him removed as head of state even if that was what was meant.

Scotland’s relationship with the monarchy is undoubtedly now in a state of flux.

There are those who believe now is the time to discuss it, those who adamantly reject that.What feels certain though is that the Queen would have been well aware of all of this, and that by choosing Balmoral “her haven, her home” as the place she would die, would kick start this discussion.

She too knew that the focus of the world would be on Scotland, that Balmoral, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the high kirk of Edinburgh St Giles Cathedral, the Royal Mile, the Scottish Parliament… all would all have a major part to play in how the nation mourned; that the focus would not purely be on London.

Most of all she would have known it would be Scots who would be the first to pay their respects, who would line the streets, who would say the first prayers.

That irrelevance that Scots have maybe felt when it comes to the royals would suddenly be thrown into sharp relief by the whole focus on the Queen’s relationship with their country.

One woman laying flowers at Holyrood told me that she had felt “compelled” to do so she just couldn’t quite explain why, two men, the very first to lay bouquets at the gates, said they were “heartbroken” at her passing and they needed to show their respect.

Perhaps most vividly in terms of how she made many Scots feel, one man waiting in the queue to pay his respects in St Giles, described her as “the glue that kept this nation together.

In death she’s doing it right now, the people are here. I hope the people wake up and figure out there’s more that unites us than divides us.”

That job now, of keeping the kingdom united, lies with her eldest son, King Charles III.