No one does births, deaths and marriages quite as effectively or emotively as the British royal family. They are the occasions on which the private becomes public, and the personal is made political. They are also moments of change, and because change causes instability, they are presented as studies in continuity.
This has always been the case, but never more so than with the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Her 70-year reign was so long that only people over 80 could recall life before she was on the throne. It meant she had become a symbol of constancy in an everchanging world.
While that durability successfully created an image of seamlessness in the workings of British statecraft, it also raised a problem for the Crown: what
