Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022): The People’s Monarch

PRIVILEGE WITH DUTY, office with service and power with responsibility. As someone who had lived through a World War, seen her sceptred isle become a shadow of itself in world politics, witnessed revolutions and the birth of new democracies, Queen Elizabeth II had an unparalleled view of world history. The original iron lady, she stood firm through tragedies, public and private; smiled gently through its celebrations; and invisibly but inevitably gritted her teeth when adversities presented themselves. England’s longest reigning monarch, the world’s most beloved unelected public official, and the coolest great-grandmother ever, passed on at her beloved Balmoral, having lived through some cataclysmic changes and innumerable challenges.

There were many, beginning perhaps with the accident of an unsuitable love affair which forced her uncle to abdicate and made her kind, wise father king, at a time England needed him most. There was the initial struggle to settle into her role, ceremonial but celebrated, remote but revered, instructional but not interfering. She presided over the decolonisation of much of the world as her country withdrew from large parts of Africa. She saw a former colony, America, become the big brother in a very special relationship. And she was part of England becoming one of the most multicultural societies in the world, a model of racial co-existence and communal harmony.

Through it all she retained her faith, practising what she had been taught, putting commitment above all else. It wasn’t easy. As much as she was queen, she was a woman, a wife, and a mother. She chose to put behind her initial troubles in her marriage to Prince Phillip, swallowed her disappointment with her son Andrew, survived the trainwreck of Charles’ marriage with Diana, and most recently weathered allegations of racism against the monarchy from her grand-daughter-in-law. If 1992 was her annus horribilis, the year in which Diana declared she was Queen of People’s Hearts, the subsequent years have shown that perseverance and resilience can be powerful propellants. Her speech in 1997, when Diana died tragically in a car crash, was a masterclass in management of a nation’s emotions, when she said: “In good times and bad, Diana never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kind­ness. I admired and respected her for her energy and commit­ment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys.”

The Queen was CEO of the family that has often contemp­tuously been called the firm, but there was never a day when she did not show up for work, even to the last, passing on only after she appointed Liz Truss the new prime minister of Britain, the 15th during her 70-year-reign.

The early lessons in duty taught to her by her parents stood her in good stead. As a 14-year-old, during World War II, she did a radio broad­cast in which she said: “We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers, and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well.” She made variations of this speech in every major crisis, most recently in April 2020 during the pandemic, when she promised the world that while “we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.”

Indeed, we did, though not for long. The Queen had become increasingly frail, especially during the massive celebrations of her Platinum Jubilee, no doubt tinged with sadness for her by the absence of her forever love, Philip, who died in 2021. It is easy to look at the Queen’s life and see only its pomp and circumstance, never more so than in her coronation in 1953, the first ever to be televised. Equally it is convenient to scoff at the Windsor version of the simple life, extolled in a 1969 disastrous BBC documentary, and then buried. But it is not so easy to see the tough decisions she has made, whether it was to counsel Charles and Diana to separate if they could not see eye to eye, see Prince Andrew stripped of his privileges, and ensure Prince Harry, fond as she may be of him, did not enjoy the perks of being a royal without working for it. For Elizabeth, the crown, above all else, was not an unnecessary burden or a dead weight. Nor was it an ornament to be displayed to the world. It was an honour, a sacrament, a cachet, a job for life.

We have seen the Queen in documentaries, movies, most recently in The Crown, Netflix’s most popular series. Often, the firm is seen less as a tightly run private limited company and more a dysfunctional family full of lazy toffs. But the Queen has always been aware of the troubles from within, reform­ing, trimming and limiting what she could do. In settling the question of what Camilla would be called, in indicating clearly her successor, and in presenting a united face to the world, with all its wear and tear, she was in a way Mother England, steering her nation’s destiny, handbag in tow.

She was not merely the nation’s commander-in-chief but also its comforter-in-chief. She was a woman who could proudly say she was gifted a handkerchief by Mahatma Gandhi, had a dance with Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah and a handshake with Martin McGuinness, senior leader of the Irish Republican Army that killed her relative, Lord Louis Mountbatten. She may not have been a politician but she was a shrewd practitioner of political gestures. Through her long public career, she never once overstepped her mark, no matter what the prov­ocation. It showed tremendous will but also dedication to the motto of her ancestors—I serve. “If we all go forward with unwavering faith, a high carriage and a quiet heart, we shall be able to make of this ancient commonwealth which we all love so dearly an even grander thing, more free, more prosperous, more happy and a more powerful influ­ence of good in the world,” she said on her 21st birthday. She remained true to it till her last breath.

Longevity is an undervalued quality in today’s culture of fast living. But it is an important one. Just remember this: when Queen Elizabeth took over from her father, polio was rampant in the US, Nelson Mandela had just been arrested, and the contraceptive pill had just been invented. For a public figure to make sense of the transforma­tion for herself, her nation, and the Commonwealth, was perhaps her greatest gift and her most unique legacy.

As the second Elizabethan age ends, and a new monarch takes over, he will need her wisdom, her wit, and her unending appetite for working for others.

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