Anne McIntosh – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II (Baroness McIntosh of Pickering)
The tribute made by Anne Caroline Ballingall McIntosh, Baroness McIntosh of Pickering, in the House of Lords on 10 September 2022.
My Lords, I am afraid it is very hard to know where one comes in the pecking order in this debate, so I apologise to anyone who feels that I have stepped ahead of them.
The impact of Her late Majesty’s death has been immense, as we have heard in this debate and beyond. We are all diminished, shocked and thrown off balance by the loss of such a key figure in our life, the life of the nation and indeed the world. Our thoughts are with her family and especially with His Majesty the King, who is assuming his onerous new role at a time of great personal sadness. His first address to us all was profoundly affecting. For me, as he spoke those words from the end of “Hamlet”, in my head I heard the opening chords of another farewell, doubtless familiar to many of your Lordships: the “Angel’s Farewell” from Elgar’s setting of Cardinal Newman’s “The Dream of Gerontius”:
“Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee”.
The King, who I believe has long understood the consoling power of great art, will need our love as well as our allegiance as he takes up his duties.
I was born in the reign of King George VI and, indeed, attended his lying in state in 1952 when I was a very small child. I am not entirely sure why my father thought it appropriate to bring one so young to queue on Westminster Bridge in the February fog, and to be honest I do not remember much about it, but I am glad I have the photograph to prove that I was there.
What I absolutely remember is going over a year later to the pub in our village to watch Her late Majesty’s coronation on television. I had never seen a television before. The screen was tiny and the room was hot and crowded, but none the less the grandeur and magic of the ceremony came through clearly. Although I have watched it many times since, that first impression stays with me of a radiant young woman at the centre of a magnificent piece of theatre embarking on a lifetime of service—and, my word, what a lifetime it turned out to be.
I shall speak very briefly, because much that needed to be said has already been said, mostly by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, about the Queen’s relationship with the arts, particularly with the theatre, where she was closely involved with the two organisations with which my I spent most of my professional life: the Royal Shakespeare Company, of which she was patron from the granting of its royal charter in 1961 until her death, and the Royal National Theatre, where she was recently succeeded as patron by the Duchess of Cornwall, now Queen Consort. Her Majesty’s patronage was hugely important to those organisations, as indeed it was to the whole cultural sector, which benefited so much from her interest and support.
I was privileged to meet her several times. I was going to share an anecdote, as so many noble Lords have done, but in the interests of brevity I have decided not to. Maybe there will be another time; noble Lords will just have to wait and see. What I wanted to say is that monarchy must be performed, as Shakespeare knew very well. I think Her Majesty was one of the great performers of our age. She famously said, “I have to be seen to be believed.” She knew that convincing performance is never about faking or pretending; it is about embodying truth. Throughout her life she had an unfailing capacity to understand exactly who she needed to be in every different circumstance, from great occasions of state through to taking on, as we have heard referenced so many times, an animatronic bear, and completely upstaging him with quietly impeccable comic timing.
She knew how to scale up and to scale down. She understood the diversity of her audiences and could adapt to their different needs while remaining always essentially herself. This ability was partly a natural gift, certainly, but also, as with all great performers, the result of meticulous preparation and unremitting hard work. As we saw, Her Majesty never stopped working at it right up until the end. She was and will remain an example to us all. May she rest in peace.
