By Caroline Davies
Elizabeth II’s job as queen was imposed on her by an ancient constitution that required no qualification other than that she exist.
Having been appointed, and whatever her private thoughts, she performed her role over an extraordinarily long reign in near-faultless manner, leaving scant ammunition for personal attack from the fiercest opponents of hereditary principle.
As Britain hurtled through times of astonishing societal change, she faced many challenges in keeping the monarchy apace – and yet she succeeded in remaining a force for national cohesion. A constant: familiar in brightly coloured coat, brimmed hat and handbag, she glad-handed her way through “walkabouts”, garden parties, ship launches, plaque unveilings, tree plantings, building inaugurations – the bread and butter of her engagements diary – with an inscrutable smile in place.
Becoming queen at such a young age meant the world knew little of her personality and views before her accession, and she continued to reveal little thereafter. She never uttered a controversial opinion in public, though supporters and critics would differ over whether this was simply because she held none, or whether she was a master of the art of political neutrality.
When caught in a maelstrom, it was most likely she had been thrust there by a lack of precedent in the protocol on which her life was solidly predicated, or wrong-footed by politicians or the antics of the younger royals.
Only those closest knew Elizabeth the wife, mother, grandmother and excellent mimic. Though the masses caught occasional glimpses of the private woman, she remained largely an enigma, and will do so until the diaries, which in royal tradition she wrote daily, are made public.
Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born third in line to the throne on 21 April 1926, at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, her maternal grandparents’ London home, 12 days before the general strike. Three months previously, John Logie Baird had given his first public demonstration of television, which would, as high-speed travel and the internet did later, transform the world during her lifetime.
When her uncle David, then Edward VIII, abdicated over his determination to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, destiny cast Elizabeth as heir presumptive at the age of 10. For the obedient, sensible princess, who neatly lined up her toy ponies outside the nursery door each night, and who was being home-schooled for an aristocratic life as a minor royal, it was a traumatic turn of events. She could, her grandmother Lady Strathmore said later, be seen at night “ardently praying for a brother”. None came.
Her stammering, introvert father, George VI, died prematurely in 1952, when she was 25, a young wife and mother of two, who had hoped for many more years between herself and the crown.
In the Elizabeth R documentary for the BBC, marking the 40th anniversary of her accession, she explained: “In a way, I didn’t have an apprenticeship. My father died much too young. It was all a very sudden kind of taking on and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something one has got used to doing and accepting that here you are and that is your fate, because I think continuity is very important. It’s a job for life.”
It was a succinct summary of her matter-of-fact attitude towards her lot.
The coronation in 1953 brought tens of thousands of people to the Mall. In unseasonably cold June drizzle and amid a blizzard of commemorative kitsch, the dazzling young queen was crowned with her handsome consort, Prince Philip, at her side. The public adoration and global fascination she attracted in those early years was of a level unmatched until Lady Diana Spencer joined the family firm 30 years later. A third of her subjects believed her to have been chosen by God. Deference was the order of the day.
Philip was at her side for 73 years. She was bereft at the loss of her lifelong companion after he died in his sleep at the age of 99 in April 2021. His death, during the Covid pandemic, led to her sitting alone and bereaved in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, during the poignant funeral, hugely scaled down because of coronavirus restrictions. The two had spent the last months of his life together in lockdown, shielding at Windsor because of their vulnerability to the virus due to their advanced years.
Though duty and diligence were her own watchwords, there were occasions when Elizabeth found herself on the back foot despite her best endeavours. Her nadir, perhaps, was 1992, described by the Queen herself as her “annus horribilis”, a year when a scandal-weary public questioned whether misbehaving royals were deserving of their tax-free status and taxpayer-funded lifestyle. Dissent was fuelled by newspapers that had long ditched deference in favour of circulation-boosting headlines. The frenzy over the state of the marriages of the Prince of Wales and Duke of York was in full spate.
The Yorks separated, Princess Anne divorced, Andrew Morton published his disquieting Diana: Her True Story, and embarrassing taped calls – one involving Diana, the other between Charles and his then lover, Camilla Parker Bowles – found their way into the tabloids.
When part of Windsor Castle then burned down and a disconsolate Queen stood watching in a drab raincoat, a rare tear glistening, there was an outpouring of sympathy. It was swiftly surpassed by outrage when the government suggested taxpayers pick up the repair bill.
As best befits a constitutional monarchy, Elizabeth II appeared largely to be a passive queen, proving to be a more than competent mouthpiece for her governments in delivering the often stilted words of politicians or starched-shirt courtier advisers.
As a mother, too, she displayed some passive tendencies, tending to leave her children to their own business. She was said to immerse herself in her red boxes, containing official government correspondence, rather than face family rows and other emotional dramas.
Nonetheless, her family were the cause of some of the more turbulent times of her reign. When, in 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped back as senior working royals and decamped to the US to seek freedom and the ability to earn their own money, it was the beginning of a difficult chapter for the monarchy.
Margaret Thatcher, when prime minister, dreaded her mandatory summer Scottish sojourn, unable to relax during informal barbecues on windswept hillsides – Philip on sausages, Queen on salad, Charles mixing dressing. Even worse were the after-dinner charades, a fact the Queen later acknowledged during a dinner with six of her former prime ministers when she joked about “the party games which some of you have so nobly endured at Balmoral”.
Such details served to flesh out a woman about whom, personally, there was a dearth of knowledge. That is why the Sunday Times’s “Thatcher row” story, in 1986, caused such a sensation. Headlined “Queen dismayed by uncaring Thatcher”, the report claimed she was actually a bit of a leftie and worried about Thatcher’s refusal to impose tough sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Furthermore, Her Majesty was also reported to be worried about race relations, inner-city decay and damage caused to the social fabric of the nation by the miners’ strike.
Feeling obliged to take Macmillan’s advice, she made, according to her biographer, the historian Ben Pimlott, “the biggest political misjudgment of her reign”. It led the Conservatives to follow Labour’s example and establish a selection process so that the Queen would never be placed in such an awkward position again.
Personally, aides indicated at the time, Lord Home was much more her cup of tea than Butler would have been, and the two enjoyed chatting about dogs, shooting and Scottish estates. Undoubtedly, she had her favourite prime ministers. Wilson was a huge hit. Edward Heath she found a bit tricky. And while she and Thatcher could not be said to have enjoyed a warm relationship, it was respectful, and the Queen went to her 2013 ceremonial funeral as a personal tribute, the first funeral of a former prime minister she had attended since Sir Winston Churchill’s in 1965.
As the nation’s figurehead, it was her job to do its bidding, by and large. And she was often called on to perform gestures of reconciliation. As such, she visited Germany in 1965, signalling the end of its post-war pariah status and, in 2011, became the first British monarch in a century to visit the Republic of Ireland.
Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral, Scotland, on September 8th, four years short of her centenary: a surprise as well as a melancholy shock, for it often seemed that she would run forever.
This cheerfulness could bear remarkable fruit. In 1958, the youthful Queen, instead of mixing with the usual blue-blooded gang, had the honor of being presented to a real aristocrat, in white tie and tails—Duke Ellington, who was performing at a festival in Yorkshire. He recalled, “She asked me when your first time was in England? Oh, I said, oh my first time in England was in 1933, way before you were born.” (Her birth was actually in 1926.) “She gave me a real American look; very cool man, which I thought was too much.” Later that night, the story goes, Ellington went back to his hotel and began composing what would wind up as “The Queen’s Suite,” in six parts. Only one copy of the recording was pressed. It was sent to Her Majesty; the piece was not heard by the public until after Duke passed away. Talk about the good and the great.
Two days before she died, the Queen received another Elizabeth—Liz Truss, the fifteenth and last Prime Minister to have served during the second Elizabethan reign. (The first was Winston Churchill.) Cynics wondered whether that meeting might have been the final straw, but, in truth, the sense of royal timing was exact. Had the Queen expired a week earlier, it would have been Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, leading the nation in mourning. He is not the man you want for grief. The revelation that parties had been held at 10 Downing Street on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, in April, 2021, was conclusive proof, if any were required, that Johnson was deaf to the prevailing mood. The Queen, needless to say, was tuned in. She sat alone at the funeral, black-masked and marooned, because she understood that, during lockdown, such sad solitude was the lot of her subjects. Simply by doing what everyone else was having to do, and by saying nothing, she shamed the laxity of her Prime Minister, and probably spelled his end.
The country that she leaves behind is scarcely at ease with itself, and whether any government, helmed by Truss or anyone else, can be expected to restore harmony is open to debate. Inflation is swelling like a pustule. Industrial unrest is afoot. So alarming is the rise in energy costs that the prospect of winter fills many families with dread. Below it all lurks a larger fear: how soon before the United Kingdom becomes a contradiction in terms? Not the least of the Queen’s innumerable duties was to act as a unifier-in-chief, and, with the removal of her guiding hand, divisions can only deepen. Though she died at Balmoral, which she loved, will the campaign for Scottish independence now find fresh impetus? What of the perennial Irish question? How about Wales? Could it be that what was once an empire, and then a commonwealth, will shrink to a single country, and then at last to one quiet village in Gloucestershire, with an empty church and a thriving line in marmalade?
“Though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all.” Thus spake the Queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I—the age-old joke being that, notwithstanding the divine right of kings, it is British queens who have stayed the course, defined their times, and earned the acclamation. If Elizabeth II was, perhaps, a more natural mother to the nation than she was to her own children, that suggests only how wide, and how convulsive, the bereavement may turn out to be. Most Britons have known no other monarch. Even the ardently loyal, asked to sing not “God save our gracious Queen” but “God save our gracious King,” will struggle to make the switch. What happens next will not merely be a matter of trading one head of state for another, or of seeing a new profile on postage stamps and coins. To get up in the morning without the Queen being around, always distant but ever present, will be like living beneath a different sky. It is all, as Duke Ellington would say, too much.
