Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was not simply Queen Elizabeth II. She was merely The Queen.
For billions of individuals, she was the one fixed in a world of bewildering change, an omnipresent matriarch linking the previous with the current.
While the large British Empire she as soon as presided over shrank, her symbolic affect solely appeared to develop, her mystique bolstered by movies like “The Queen” and the Netflix collection “The Crown”.
Against the tide of historical past and logic, she made a medieval anachronism in some way fashionable, a stoic previous woman in a hat onto whom a lot could possibly be projected.
Perhaps solely the pope held as a lot sway, and he or she noticed seven of them come and go throughout her record-breaking seven-decade reign.
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Accident of historical past
Although Elizabeth Windsor grew to become the very definition of the phrase, she was not born to be queen.
An accident of historical past introduced her to the throne.
Until her “Uncle David” — Edward VIII — abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson in 1936, she had solely an out of doors probability of reigning.
Even as inheritor obvious, the start of a child brother would have despatched her again into relative aristocratic obscurity below succession legal guidelines in place on the time that gave priority to males.
All modified for “Lilibet” when she was 10 and her reluctant, stammering father grew to become George VI.
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Until the “shock” of the abdication, she had been introduced up precisely like her extra outgoing youthful sister Margaret. The two have been typically dressed like twins.
Her tough-minded mom, additionally known as Elizabeth, was her emotional lodestar. She made positive the women had an “insulated and care-free childhood” in distinction to the suffocating Palace strictures their father suffered.
Nevertheless, she discovered responsibility early.
“Princess Elizabeth was quite a good tap dancer and mimic and could be very funny when she wanted to be,”
mentioned royal biographer Andrew Morton, whose research of her shut however typically strained relationship with Margaret appeared in 2021.
And she “could be depended upon to do what was asked, keeping her toys and clothes in perfect order”.
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‘Magnificent isolation’
An introvert, she tailored simply to the “magnificent isolation” of royal life spent surrounded by scores of servants and courtiers.
The royal household — George VI, Queen Elizabeth, princess Elizabeth and princess Margaret — referred to themselves as “we four”, Morton mentioned, and have been shut.
Yet as queen, Elizabeth regarded extra to her steely and stolid grandfather George V — a reformer who believed in main by instance.
Her biographer, Robert Lacey, advised AFP that like him she noticed the decline of the English class system, and wished to determine a direct relationship with the folks.
George V started the royal broadcasts, which the queen used to hone her personal mixture of thriller and intimacy, inviting tv viewers into Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle for fairly stilted fireplace chats surrounded by images of her youngsters, canines and horses.
Young queen
Her coronation on June 2, 1953 was the primary main occasion of the tv age.
The information that morning of New Zealander Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest made the celebrations all the extra giddy.
The Union Jack had been planted on the highest of world, as Britain financed the expedition, alongside that of the United Nations and Nepal.
But for all the glamour of the younger queen — then simply 25 — and discuss of a second Elizabethan age, Imperial Britain was in bother.
India — the so-called “Jewel in the Crown” — had already gained independence in 1947.
Hard-won victory in World War II had left the nation exhausted and just about bankrupt, its cities bomb-scarred and rationing was in its 14th 12 months.
The Suez Crisis in 1956 would deal Britain’s standing as a world energy a last shattering blow.
While the Tudor-era Elizabeth I within the sixteenth century oversaw the start of England’s imperial mission, Elizabeth II’s destiny was to look at the flag come down on the largest empire the world has ever seen.
The newest to go was Barbados, which minimize ties with the British Crown after practically 4 centuries in 2021.
Quiet reformer
Such a retreat would have carried different monarchies with it, however the queen was the embodiment of British stiff higher lip and its “keep calm and carry on” spirit.
She had already accomplished her dynastic responsibility by giving start to an “heir and a spare” — a successor and a youthful sibling — by the time she was topped.
With the ageing Winston Churchill — the primary of 15 British prime ministers to serve below her — at her facet, she started to slowly reinvent the establishment.
Decades sidestepping diplomatic bear traps on unending royal excursions and state visits made her a formidable operator.
Those abilities have been “capital” in holding the Commonwealth of extremely various principally former British colonies collectively, Lacey insisted.
Despite crises and conflicts, it nonetheless counts 54 nations with a mixed inhabitants of two.57 billion folks.
Princess in love
The queen was 13 when she fell for her 18-year-old third cousin Philip in 1939, then a dashing naval cadet getting ready to go to conflict.
Her nanny famous that “she never took her eyes off him”. Letters have been quickly flying forwards and backwards.
Despite the fixed risk, the longer term queen skilled her biggest freedom throughout these teenage wartime years.
Relatively secure behind the thick partitions of Windsor Castle, west of London, she grew to become a volunteer driver and mechanic.
When victory was declared in 1945, the 19-year-old princess joined the crowds celebrating in central London alongside along with her mates and her sister Margaret.
She later described it as “one of the most memorable nights of my life. I remember we were terrified of being recognised.”
Two years later, regardless of her mom’s reservations — the Queen Mother referred to plain-speaking Philip as “the Hun” due to his German wider household — she married the impecunious Danish-Greek prince.
She gave start to Charles 11 months later and Anne adopted in 1950. Andrew — mentioned to be her favorite — arrived in 1960, with Edward born 4 years later.
The queen was a one-man girl, who “never looked at anyone else”, her cousin and confidant Margaret Rhodes mentioned.
Philip’s marital constancy was reportedly much less positive, however his sense of responsibility was equally iron solid.
Their 73-year partnership, which lasted till his demise in April 2021, was her “strength and stay”, the queen later confessed.
Both liked horses. The queen’s racing stables turned out some 1,700 winners, with the Racing Post occupying pleasure of place on her desk alongside state papers.
She solely missed two Epsom Derbies in her complete reign.
Philip performed polo into his 50s and raced carriages into his 90s. Fittingly each have been obsessive about breeding.
On her extremely delicate royal go to to Ireland in 2011 — the primary by a British royal since its independence — the queen met nearly as many horses as folks after asking to absorb two well-known stud farms.
Humanising the royals
Thoroughbreds will be troublesome to deal with. And this was additionally to show true with members of the royal household, often known as “The Firm”, who would grow to be extra seen than ever below Elizabeth’s reign.
The world acquired its first glimpse of their personal lives in 1969 when BBC cameras have been allowed across the Buckingham Palace breakfast desk.
The documentary was a part of a bid to “humanise” the monarchy masterminded by Philip’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and the previous viceroy of India’s son-in-law, movie producer John Knatchbull, the seventh Baron Brabourne.
Since the start of her reign, the Palace had sought to painting the royals as a household like some other, a extra well-born, well-appointed model of a contemporary British family.
But “Royal Family” lifted the veil additional than ever earlier than, revealing some shocking quirks — behind her shy and dutiful exterior, the queen was truly a fairly racy driver.
Not for the final time, it was Prince Philip who delivered the largest bombshell, telling viewers how the queen’s father King George VI would take out his rage on the rhododendrons.
“Sometimes I thought he was mad,”
he deadpanned.
Critics, together with Princess Anne — who known as the movie “rotten” — blamed it for opening the door to the tabloid voyeurism that might quickly canine the clan.
Tabloid troubles
The queen’s fairly unruly and resentful sister, Margaret, was first within the firing line, her vibrant personal life making her prime paparazzi materials.
All the royals, aside from the “untouchable” queen herself and Prince Philip, would in time really feel the swipe of the media’s double-edged sword.
Yet the queen appeared to drift above it all, her life a fastidiously guarded secret.
Beyond her love of horses and fairly snappy Corgi canines, together with a passion for crossword puzzles and a Dubonnet and gin cocktail earlier than lunch, little or no about her personal life was identified.
In later life she developed a passion for tv cleaning soap operas, and whereas self-isolating in Windsor through the coronavirus lockdown is alleged to have grow to be a fan of the police corruption drama “Line of Duty”.
She even reportedly watched the upper-class interval drama “Downton Abbey”.
In 2021, when she was pressured to decelerate due to unwell well being, The Times reported that late-night tv had left her “knackered”.
She even stopped ingesting her lunchtime gin and martini within the night.
‘Annus horribilis’
For a time, there was a lot to have fun in her youngsters’s lives.
The “fairytale” marriage of Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 was an enormous international media occasion, as was the marriage of Andrew to Sarah Ferguson 5 years later.
Yet the {couples}’ personal lives would quickly present limitless fodder for the voracious British tabloids.
Both marriages very publicly fell aside in 1992, as did Anne’s to Captain Mark Phillips. To high it all, Windsor Castle was badly broken by fireplace.
The queen known as it her “annus horribilis”.
In an effort to win again public assist, she started paying tax and Buckingham Palace was opened to the general public for the primary time.
But the rancour between Charles and Diana grew to become toxic as they settled scores in rival TV interviews in what grew to become often known as the “War of the Waleses”.
And then the unimaginable occurred. Diana’s tragic finish in a automotive crash in Paris in 1997 not solely shook confidence within the monarchy, however within the queen herself.
Diana
A collection of missteps within the days after her daughter-in-law’s demise left the queen wanting chilly, uncaring and out of contact.
“Show us you care,” mentioned one newspaper entrance web page after the queen opted to remain in her Scottish summer season retreat of Balmoral fairly return to London.
“Speak to us Ma’am,” headlined one other, in criticism that might have been unthinkable just a few years earlier than.
And her choice to strip the so-called “People’s Princess” of her royal standing within the wake of Diana’s bombshell 1995 BBC interview got here again to hang-out the monarch.
But by means of it all, the queen saved her counsel, sticking doggedly to the royals’ reputed mantra of “never complain, never explain”.
It could have helped preserve the establishment’s mystique in previous however right here it badly backfired.
A serious Palace overhaul adopted.
Help in restoring religion within the monarch was to return from an unlikely supply — the self-confessed “old republican left-winger” Stephen Frears.
His Oscar-winning 2008 film “The Queen”, set in opposition to the backdrop of the Diana disaster, did a lot to clarify her place and rewrite the narrative.
Helen Mirren — one other republican — received an Oscar for her shifting portrayal of the queen’s wrestle between responsibility and household, successful her sympathy even from individuals who had little time for the monarchy.
The downside with Charles
Rehabilitating Charles can be trickier. As early as 1977, throughout her Silver Jubilee marking 25 years on the throne, the queen had vowed to rule till her demise.
While this promised stability, it additionally appeared to undermine the Prince of Wales, whom some noticed as unfit to comply with her.
His buttonholing of politicians over his passion horse causes appeared to problem the unwritten rule that the royals keep out of politics.
However, as a lot of his as soon as “fringe” concepts, corresponding to on the setting, grew to become mainstream, Charles has proven a extra relaxed, self-deprecating facet, notably after his 2005 marriage to his lifelong lover Camilla.
With his mom in her 90s, he started to take over her duties as essentially the most senior royal on abroad journeys.
Family
Despite the comfort of grandchildren and nice grandchildren within the twilight of her reign, her biggest complications continued to return from inside her family.
Now the longest serving British monarch ever, the marriages of each of her grandsons William and Harry to commoners appeared to supply one other section of modernisation and renewal.
However, inside three years of Harry’s mould-breaking marriage to the mixed-race American actress Meghan Markle in 2018, a rift with the Palace grew to become horribly public.
A month after allegations of racism inside the household have been raised in a tv interview with Oprah Winfrey, Philip died aged 99 in April 2021, leaving her ever extra alone.
With Andrew additionally mired in underage intercourse allegations over hyperlinks with convicted intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, it was one other “annus horribilis”.
Last of her type?
Yet the monarch herself remained vastly widespread and admired, an embodiment of conventional values and all that appeared everlasting about England.
In his guide on her and her sister, Morton recounts how Margaret burst in on the queen’s weekly viewers with the prime minister early in her reign.
“If you weren’t queen, nobody would talk to you,”
Margaret fumed, indignant at being unnoticed.
Time and once more since, Elizabeth proved the opposite, that she was infinitely worthy — the primary and maybe the “last global monarch”, because the New York Times put it in 2021.
The unknowable mystique she cultivated in a world ever extra demanding of transparency could nicely die along with her.
© Agence France-Presse
