The age of deference is gone – so what explains our need to keep bowing to the Windsors?

We’ve reached an age in which deference is not only old-fashioned but is also considered naive, even dangerous. And yet, writes Hannah Fearn...

The Queen was the last of a generation whose lives were shaped by being deferent to others (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

In her last two decades, Queen Elizabeth II reminded me a lot of my grandmother. The knee-length, fitted tweed skirts, the blunt-toed court shoes, the same string of pearls loosely hanging around the collar of a pressed blouse. Inevitably, much of the public grief we are witnessing this week is a reference to each individual past loss. For those of us in middle age, it’s something else too: a cultural shift, marking the end of the age of deference. It went along with our grandmothers.

Maybe that’s an odd conclusion to draw while thousands queue without refreshments or toilet breaks to file past the closed coffin of a woman they never knew. You couldn’t design a better visual definition of the act of deference, but it might be the last time we see a spectacle like this.

The Queen was the last of a generation whose lives were shaped by being compliant to others. Elizabeth II’s long life of service was in itself a gesture of submission to the British state and to its people, and its people echoed it in return: hierarchy sculpted society and how citizens behaved within it.