Did Cancer Kill the Queen?

A new book about Queen Elizabeth II is garnering headlines by feeding a curiosity about the longest-reigning British monarch’s death, a ghoulish obsession that Buckingham Palace feeds by employing a Victorian Era PR strategy in a 21st Century world.Gyles Brandreth, author of “Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait from the Writer Who Knew Her and Her Family for Over Fifty Years,” writes, “I had heard that the queen had a form of myeloma — bone marrow cancer — which would explain her tiredness and weight loss and those ‘mobility issues’ we were often told about during the last year or so of her life.”This detail is not only second hand, but without a source. “I had heard” is hearsay. The Queen may well have succumbed to cancer, but all 96-year-olds have the symptoms described in the book. The rare exceptions include such as actor Dick Van Dyke, who’s still dancing up a storm.As President John Quincy Adams said when asked about his health and the prospect of God restoring it, “I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement — battered by the winds and broken in upon by the storms — and from all I can learn, the Landlord does not intend to repair.”After the Queen’s passing, I wrote in the Sun, “Nature abhors vacuums, so it will be up to King Charles III to squelch burgeoning conspiracy theories if his mother is to rest in peace.” He has chosen not to do so, seeking to guard his mother’s privacy, thereby ensuring fresh headlines every time someone floats a new claim.The public accepts that subjects of the queen or citizens of a republic are mortals, and our physical clockwork winds down like that of Big Ben. We move on to celebrating the legacy built over a lifetime of minutes and hours, rather than focusing on what caused the second hand’s inevitable final tick.However, the fact that Big Ben was renamed Elizabeth Tower to mark the Queen’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee for 60 years on the throne demonstrates that she was not just another human timepiece. “Old age” on the death certificate leaves too much room for speculation when such a figure passes.The head of the royal medical household, physician Sir Huw Thomas, executed the same game plan last year when Prince Philip died. The doctor declined to release his death certificate for a month, whereupon the cause of death was also listed as the obvious — and unsatisfying — fact of his advanced years.Americans have experienced similar refusals to accept mortality. Thirty years ago, a novelist gave her book a public relations boost by raising the prospect that President Tyler had been assassinated with cyanide in 1850, succeeding in getting Old Rough and Ready’s body exhumed. Testing found no trace of poison.President Harding, who died in 1920, is also the target of rhetorical desecration, in part because his wife, Florence, refused to allow an autopsy, which is imagined to convict her of murdering her spouse for his well-documented philandering.President Kennedy has been the subject of epic speculation, despite such exhaustive works of scholarship as Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” in which the investigative journalist and attorney documents that the assassin acted alone. Queen Elizabeth I was, upon her death in 1603, also interred without an autopsy, and because she never married, claims endure that “the Virgin Queen” was a man, a theory popularized by the author of “Dracula,” Bram Stoker, who believed that the princess had died in childhood and been replaced by a boy doppelganger. Well-meaning authors, kooks, and conspiracy theorists know that nothing sells a book faster or gets more retweets than a new salacious allegation, denying the very eternal peace that families seek to ensure by pulling a veil of secrecy over a loved one’s passing.Queen Elizabeth II was a public figure and will remain as much a source of attention in death as she was in life. King Charles can’t squelch all the rumors about his mother, but he can tamp them down by being transparent. While it might be difficult to break with royal precedent, it would help ensure that Elizabeth II enjoys a well-earned rest.

Did Cancer Kill the Queen?

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