The tributes paid to the late Queen Elizabeth over the past number of days have been legion, but one comment by a former royal courtier, quoted in a piece by Alastair Campbell, stood out for me: that the Queen understood 'the communism of humanity'. Now, that is a startling claim; its substance, its subject and its source. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was, by definition, by royal proclamation, to all of us, radically different. When she was just a mere princess, Life magazine talked of the 500 million people and the 14 million square miles over which she might one day rule. Even as empire faded, she lived in palaces, rode in gold carriages, traversed the globe in royal yachts and planes—a fairy-tale existence when compared to the everyday life of virtually all others. And yet, for countless millions, there was a sense of mutual connection—almost a personal relationship. In the words of the unnamed courtier:

'They know she is different, but they also know she is the same, eats the same things, breathes the same air, understands them and wants them to understand her.'

It's the Queen herself that best captured this sense of affinity, in the words she used about Princess Diana, in the days after her tragically untimely death:

'No-one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.'

They're words that ring true now for Queen Elizabeth, as they did then for Diana. In that speech, the Queen spoke to us, in her words, 'from the heart', not just as monarch but as matriarch. Who among us can even begin to imagine what it is to be royal? But many of us will know what it is to be a grandmother or grandfather, to lose a parent, to comfort a child in pain. We all cope with loss 'in our different ways', the Queen said then. Now, we mourn her own passing—again in our different ways; many, as a mark of veneration, of a servant Queen who lived and died as the very personification of duty, decency and care. Some will identify simply with the family and its grief, feeling, perhaps, in this moment of public sadness some personal echo of private loss. And, by no means few, particularly among older generations, will have felt a deep sense of dislocation, of saying goodbye to a part of themselves, as Queen Elizabeth has been a permanent reference point.

The Queen's constancy and the comfort that could bring in often turbulent times has certainly been a recurrent theme, yet Queen Elizabeth could often confound those who saw her as one-dimensional, imprisoned by the past or other people's expectations.

George MacLeod, the socialist firebrand and ardent pacifist, founder of the Iona community, was appointed by the Queen formally as royal chaplain and informally as Prince Philip's verbal sparring partner. She disagreed with Mrs Thatcher's refusal to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa, as well as her policies of austerity at home. And, in an unscripted aside to you, Llywydd, on her last visit to the Senedd, she rightly castigated politicians for often being all talk and no action on the global climate crisis.

In 2011, on a historic first visit by a British monarch to the Irish Republic, she shocked pretty much everyone by laying a wreath and bowing her head at the garden of remembrance in Dublin, honouring all those who gave their lives in the name of Irish freedom. In a speech at Dublin castle, she declared,

'With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.'

That was greater candour and contrition over the sins of Britain's past, at least in these islands, than has ever been demonstrated by most of Britain's political leaders, and much of our media.

Tomorrow, the Queen will lie in state at St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, where George MacLeod was once assistant. He went from there to work with the poor in Glasgow and on to Iona, helping to rebuild the historic Abbey, which the Queen visited and supported financially—controversially so, given the pacifism of its founder. There are 48 kings buried there, alongside one former party leader, in a clutch of simple stones on a tiny windswept island, a symbol that however we are born, however we live, we die as part of one common family: the ultimate communism of humanity, the fundamental oneness of us all and of all things.