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Queen Elizabeth: The monarch at the heart of an evolving Britain

by Sara Miller Llana, CSM Staff writer & Shafi Musaddique, CSM Special contributor from LONDON

149242Britain's Queen Elizabeth II smiles as she leaves a service of Thanksgiving to mark the Centenary of the Royal British Legion at Westminster Abbey in London, Oct. 12, 2021. Buckingham Palace announced on Sept. 8, 2022, that the queen, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, had died.AP/File

September 8, 2022

When Queen Elizabeth II ascended the British throne in 1952, her empire from the West Indies to the Far East was in its final stages of decline, having lost the crown’s leading dominion, India, five years prior.

Having reigned for 70 years, she was the longest-serving of any British monarch, beating Queen Victoria’s 63 years. Just this spring, she celebrated a Platinum Jubilee in 2022, marked by four days of festivities. If the two queens were widely popular figureheads, both seen as national grandmothers by the end of their reigns, they ruled over very different Britains. Queen Victoria oversaw a period of industrial and military change – and the rapid expansion of the British Empire to global domination.

Queen Elizabeth oversaw the empire’s diminishment and Britain’s struggle to define itself in the postwar era from a superpower to a bit nation in the British Isles. Her death, at the age of 96, comes at a time of great uncertainty with war having returned to Europe, a major economic crisis looming and threatening to plunge many into poverty, and turbulence in British politics in the wake of Brexit and the pandemic.

Yet through all of the tumult that has led to so much self-reflection in British society about the country’s place in the world, Queen Elizabeth’s legacy has been to maintain a sense of forward-moving purpose – and faith that the monarchy itself serves a purpose – when pessimism and insecurity could have caused Britons to turn their backs.

149242A/P filePrincess Elizabeth (right), as a teenager, appears with her sister Princess Margaret before giving her first radio broadcast in London on Oct. 13, 1940.

She accepted the weight of decolonization – which hung so heavily over her father, King George VI, who lost India during his rule – and turned it into a positive force in the shape of the Commonwealth of Nations. In doing so, she embraced a changing Britain, both as it became a multiracial, multicultural society at home, and as it found a place on the global stage. The grouping of former dependencies was her beloved project from its earliest inception. Within five months of her coronation, she embarked on the most ambitious Royal Tour of the Commonwealth the world had yet seen. She kicked off her Diamond Jubilee 60 years later in the city of Leicester, Britain’s most diverse. That was no coincidence.

Ultimately, Queen Elizabeth managed to keep opinions of the monarchy steady, despite internal sagas and mishaps. In an age in which mainstream politics has fallen victim to the protest against the status quo, the ancient monarchy – the epitome of the establishment – is as popular as ever, so much so that it’s easy to forget that the monarchy is actually “a fragile institution,” says Philip Murphy, professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of London.

Without Queen Elizabeth, he says, the monarchy’s march into the modern era could never have been so seamless. “What we have had since 1952 is a monarch perfectly attuned to the kind of needs and role of a modern constitutional monarch,” he says. “You can’t take the monarchy for granted. It’s got to be reinvented the whole time.”

Elizabeth was born in 1926 and never expected to take the throne. But all of that changed when her uncle King Edward VIII abdicated to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, leaving her father as king.

149242AP/fileKing George V, Princess Elizabeth waving to the crowd, and Her Majesty Queen Mary appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London on May 6, 1935, after attending the Jubilee service at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Elizabeth’s natural inclination for order, which her nanny noted in the 1950s, was shaken by the constitutional and family crisis. The abdication, and her deep spirituality, fortified her sense of mission and dedication. At age 21 she solemnly made a speech to the Commonwealth: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong.”

Page created on 9/9/2022 3:55:41 PM

Last edited 9/9/2022 4:54:12 PM

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