Elizabeth II: she was the Queen for billions of people

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was not just Queen Elizabeth II. She was simply The Queen. For billions of people, she was the one constant in a world of bewildering change, an omnipresent matriarch linking the past with the present. While the enormous British Empire she once presided over shrank, her symbolic influence only seemed to grow, her mystique bolstered by films like “The Queen” and the Netflix series “The Crown.”

Against the tide of history and logic, she made a medieval anachronism somehow modern, a stoic old lady in a hat onto whom so much could be projected. Perhaps only the pope held as much sway, and she saw seven of them come and go during her record-breaking seven-decade reign.

Although Elizabeth Windsor became the very definition of the word, she was not born to be Queen. An accident of history brought her to the throne. Until her “Uncle David” — Edward VIII — abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson in 1936, she had only an outside chance of reigning.

Even as heir apparent, the birth of a baby brother would have sent her back into relative aristocratic obscurity under succession laws in place at the time that gave precedence to males.

All changed for “Lilibet” when she was 10 and her reluctant, stammering father became George VI.  Until the “shock” of the abdication, she had been brought up exactly like her more outgoing younger sister Margaret. The two were often dressed like twins.

Her tough-minded mother, also called Elizabeth, was her emotional lodestar. She made sure the girls had an “insulated and care-free childhood” in contrast to the suffocating Palace strictures their father suffered. Nevertheless, she learned duty early.

“Princess Elizabeth was quite a good tap dancer and mimic and could be very funny when she wanted to be,” said royal biographer Andrew Morton, whose study of her close but often 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”.

An introvert, she adapted easily to the “magnificent isolation” of royal life spent surrounded by scores of servants and courtiers. The royal family — George VI, Queen Elizabeth, princess Elizabeth and princess Margaret —referred to themselves as “we four”, Morton said, and were close.

Yet as Queen, Elizabeth looked more to her steely and stolid grandfather George V — a reformer who believed in leading by example. Her biographer, Robert Lacey, told AFP that like him she saw the decline of the English class system, and wanted to establish a direct relationship with the people. George V began the royal broadcasts, which the Queen used to hone her own mix of mystery and intimacy, inviting television viewers into Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle for rather stilted fireside chats surrounded by photographs of her children, dogs and horses.

Her coronation on June 2, 1953 was the first major event of the television age.  The news that morning of New Zealander Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest made the celebrations all the more giddy. The Union Jack had been planted on the top of world, as Britain financed the expedition, alongside that of the United Nations and Nepal.

But for all the glamour of the young Queen — then just 25 — and talk of a second Elizabethan age, Imperial Britain was in trouble.  India — the so-called “Jewel in the Crown” — had already gained independence in 1947.

Hard-won victory in World War II had left the country exhausted and virtually bankrupt, its cities bomb-scarred and rationing was in its 14th year.

The Suez Crisis in 1956 would deal Britain’s status as a world power a final shattering blow. While the Tudor-era Elizabeth I in the 16th century oversaw the birth of England’s imperial project, Elizabeth II’s fate was to watch the flag come down on the biggest empire the world has ever seen. The latest to go was Barbados, which cut ties with the British Crown after nearly four centuries in 2021.

Such a retreat would have carried other monarchies with it, but the Queen was the embodiment of British stiff upper lip and its “keep calm and carry on” spirit.

She had already done her dynastic duty by giving birth to an “heir and a spare” — a successor and a younger sibling — by the time she was crowned.

With the ageing Winston Churchill — the first of 15 British prime ministers to serve under her — at her side, she began to slowly reinvent the institution.  Decades sidestepping diplomatic bear traps on never-ending royal tours and state visits made her a formidable operator.

Those skills have been “capital” in holding the Commonwealth of incredibly diverse mostly former British colonies together, Lacey insisted. Despite crises and conflicts, it still counts 54 countries with a combined population of 2.57 billion people.

The Queen was 13 when she fell for her 18-year-old third cousin Philip in 1939, then a dashing naval cadet preparing to go to war. Her nanny noted that “she never took her eyes off him”. Letters were soon flying back and forth. Despite the constant threat, the future Queen experienced her greatest freedom during those teenage wartime years. Relatively safe behind the thick walls of Windsor Castle, west of London, she became a volunteer driver and mechanic.

When victory was declared in 1945, the 19-year-old princess joined the crowds celebrating in central London along with her friends 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, despite her mother’s reservations — the Queen Mother referred to plain-speaking Philip as “the Hun” because of his German wider family — she married the impecunious Danish-Greek prince. She gave birth to Charles 11 months later and Anne followed in 1950. Andrew — said to be her favourite — arrived in 1960, with Edward born four years later. The Queen was a one-man woman, who “never looked at anyone else”, her cousin and confidant Margaret Rhodes said. Philip’s marital fidelity was reportedly less sure, but his sense of duty was equally iron cast.  Their 73-year partnership, which lasted until his death in April 2021, was her “strength and stay”, the Queen later confessed.

Both loved horses. The Queen’s racing stables turned out some 1,700 winners, with the Racing Post occupying pride of place on her desk alongside state papers. She only missed two Epsom Derbies in her entire reign.

Philip played polo into his 50s and raced carriages into his 90s. Fittingly both were obsessed with breeding. On her highly sensitive royal visit to Ireland in 2011 — the first by a British royal since its independence — the Queen met almost as many horses as people after asking to take in two famous stud farms.

Agence France-Presse