On Monday, Queen Elizabeth issued a royal pardon to Alan Turing, aka the father of modern computing. Turing was a mathematician whose work as a codebreaker during World War II saved the lives of countless British citizens. But he was also a gay man in an inhospitable world. He was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952, fired from his job and chemically castrated. He killed himself two years later. The Queen’s act essentially dismissed his conviction. But a pardon is not an apology.

A pardon says, “you’re forgiven”; an apology says, “you were wronged.” The Queen invoked her Royal Prerogative of Mercy but did not apologize.

This isn’t surprising. For years, without success, techies the world over have urged the British government to express regret for the fact that Turing was horribly mistreated. Over 37,000 people signed a petition asking Downing Street to apologize formally for the war hero’s post-war treatment. But conservative lawmakers have consistently blocked any attempt at either an apology or Parliamentary pardon, pointing out that Turing had broken the law; anti-sodomy ordinances had been on the books in England since 1885. In February 2012, Justice Minister Lord McNally said that Mr. Turing “would have known” he was committing a crime, adding, “long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.”

Also, legally speaking, Turing had no surviving immediate family for the government to apologize to. That didn’t stop Prime Minster Gordon Brown from offered a personal apology in 2009, saying, “He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.” Brown went on:

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly. Over the years, millions more lived in fear in conviction. I am proud that those days are gone and that in the past 12 years this Government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present. So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: we’re sorry. You deserved so much better.

That’s a lovely personal apology, but it has no muscle. It has no governmental authority. And as a personal apology, it’s essentially meaningless; Brown was born in 1951, the year before Turing’s prosecution. Most importantly, a personal apology doesn’t need to address the government’s role in persecuting nearly 50,000 other men who were convicted of the same crime. But as British human rights activist Peter Tatchell pointed out, “The problem is, of course, if there was a general pardon for men who had been prosecuted for homosexuality, many of them are still alive and they could get compensation.” The Queen’s Prerogative of Mercy allows her to strike Turing’s conviction from history without acknowledging that she and her country identically wronged thousands of other people. Which is, of course, her prerogative. Hence the title.

Gratuitous photo of Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing in the forthcoming biopic The Imitation Game

A pardon erases history. But an apology can change it.