"Royal institution is no longer the immovable force it was under Queen Elizabeth Three-and-a-half years ago, I sat in Westminster Abbey as a vast assemblage of the world's rulers gathered to mourn Queen Elizabeth II. But that wasn't all that was happening. No one in that immense congregation was ignorant of a wider reality: they had come not just to bury a monarch, but an era."
"This symbolised the passing of the world of my parents' and my grandparents' generations. We now know much of that world's flaws, but it also contained much that was noble. Just as titanic public figures from De Valera to Churchill came to symbolise their age, so Queen Elizabeth had come to encapsulate something much greater than herself. For decades, that world with its values and beliefs had been dying, but this was the moment of realisation that the future would be decidedly different."
A vast congregation of world leaders assembled at Westminster Abbey to mourn Queen Elizabeth II, and the occasion also marked the symbolic burial of an era. The event illustrated the passing of the generational world of parents and grandparents, a world now understood to contain both flaws and noble elements. Longstanding public figures once symbolised their age, and Queen Elizabeth came to encapsulate values larger than her person. For decades those values and beliefs had been in decline, and the funeral crystallised the realization that the future would diverge markedly from that past.
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