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LIFETIME OF SERVICE
How the Queen was the world’s one constant during more than seven decades of change
W HAT will history make of the Queen?
For anyone under the age of 70, she was the only sovereign we have ever known. Millions of us have been born, have grown up and settled down with the same woman at our country’s helm.
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She was simply always there — what historian Peter Hennessy calls our “gilt-edged constant”.
She was the weather, the landscape and the background to all our lives. Across more than seven decades of change, she — gently and assuredly — was our solitary fixed point.
While affection for the Royal Family wavered, and society changed from being deferential to irreverential, esteem for the was undimmed. Even in the 1990s — as royal marriages broke down, Windsor Castle burnt down, royal finances came under scrutiny and the tragedy of Diana, Princess of Wales unfurled — political theorists might have written of “Elizabeth the Last”. Yet her approval rating, dropping to a low of 73 per cent, was one that most politicians would kill to have.
The length of her reign alone — 70 years — guarantees her a place in the history books.
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When she came to the throne, Winston Churchill still had three years to serve as Prime Minister and the British monarch still reigned in much of Africa. By the time of her death, she had long overtaken her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s mere 63 years and 21 days on the throne to become the longest-reigning British monarch.
Surely no other king or queen will reach their Platinum Jubilee. But her place in history will be assured by far greater than longevity alone.
Of course, there are those that will disagree. She did not give her name to an age, despite attempts to make “the new Elizabethans” stick.
“She has done and said nothing that anybody will remember”, said historian David Starkey, that great contrarian. Others say she was nothing but a cipher, that it is difficult to point to any major achievements, and that the death of a British monarch changes little in practical terms.
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So, what will history make of Her Majesty?
Historians will, first of all, note that she defined what the modern monarchy is. Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne at a time when the world seemed ripe with possibilities. Princess Margaret described the coronation as a “phoenix-time”. She continued, “Everything was being raised from the ashes . . . and nothing to stop anything getting better and better”.
The earnest and elegant young queen seemed a symbol of the age. “When I was a little boy, I read about a fairy princess,” said US President Harry Truman when they met on the Queen’s first trip to New York in 1949. “And there she is.”
But the period after the Queen’s accession was one that saw the contraction, not the expansion, of British power. In her reign, she presided over the country’s declining geopolitical power, a social revolution, the transformation into a multicultural society and the joining and leaving of Europe. This presented a challenge: How could the country and the crown carve out a place for itself in a post-imperial world?
The way she would do it was predicted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, at her coronation. He argued that the diminution of the temporal power of the crown did not reduce the importance of her role but enhanced it.
It gave it the “possibility of a spiritual power . . . the power to lead, to inspire, to unite, by the Sovereign’s personal character, personal convictions, personal example”. This she did.
There still exists no written code for how a constitutional monarch should function but the Queen’s personality created a blueprint for the role and nature of monarchy in the modern age.
Historians will surely also note that a fundamental component to her personality — and to her historic importance — has been her unique and selfless commitment to duty.
As a young woman of 21, she broadcast from Cape Town these words: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” Never mind that her speech had been written by courtier Sir Alan Lascelles, she made the sentiment her own.
Her life honoured this vow. Reflecting on accession 40 years later, she said, “My father died much too young and so it was all very sudden . . . taking on and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something . . . and accepting the fact that it’s your fate . . . it’s a job for life”. It certainly was.
Although in recent years the Queen handed over an increasing number of royal responsibilities and patronages to younger family members — reducing, for example, the number of public engagements she attended from 332 in 2016 to 283 in 2018 — it remained an extraordinary and unique burden.
Prime Ministers and Presidents work horrendously long hours, but they choose and are elected to do so — and their term ends. For the Queen, it was a lifetime of service.
There was some speculation about whether she would hand over most of her duties when she turned 95 — the age at which Prince Philip withdrew from his public duties — but her 95th birthday came and went without any such announcement. She even returned to royal duties just four days after the death of her lifelong companion, the Duke of Edinburgh, to mark the retirement of William, Lord Peel as Lord Chamberlain, her household’s most senior official. It was a clear indication: Duty first, self second.
In 2012, Lord Hennessy remarked, “One scans the world in vain for another 60-year example of faultless public duty”. In the end, of course, it was far more. It is not just about the quantity of years she served, but the quality of that service.
What drove such a sense of commitment? The Queen’s deep Christian faith played a significant role. It is clear she also had an almost visceral reaction to the idea of abdication — the failure of responsibility that she perceived as ruining her father’s life. She set herself a high bar.
Asked by former New Zealand PM Sir John Key, why she wore formal dress even on occasions when there were no crowds or cameras, she replied, “I am the last bastion of standards”.
In 1951, during her father’s last illness, Princess Elizabeth presided over Trooping the Colour on Horse Guards Parade for the first time. Sat side-saddle in the scarlet tunic of the Colonel of the Grenadiers, in an otherwise all-male event, she was, as The Times put it, “A woman alone”.
In many respects, it was the epitaph of her life. The way she operated in a man’s world and grappled with gender expectations will be something that future historians will ponder.
SHE was not the first queen regnant of England, but coming to the throne during the 1950s she still faced tremendous cultural prejudice against female power.
Much has been made of the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh was unable to pass his name to his children and gave up his career in support of hers, but the Queen too had to pioneer a way through the traditional gender roles of the time.
When she became Queen, she was written off in a way that no male monarch ever was — her “lovely teeth, hair, and eyes, and that amazing quality of skin” all came in for comment.
She was also only the third British monarch to be a mother, at a time when the idea of a mother working at all was looked at askance.
Being a head of state and a hands-on parent are not easily compatible roles. By modern standards her early parenting looked somewhat distant and remote. She appeared unsentimental, and was said to rarely hug or kiss her children.
Her own upbringing had been one of contradiction — full of love from parents and servants but dominated by unbending convention and the weighty expectations that came with her calling. However, she did spend half an hour in the morning and 90 minutes each evening in the nursery playing with her children, bathing them, and tucking them up in bed.
But she also left the children with their nannies for long periods of time, even before becoming Queen. When Philip returned to active naval service in October 1949 in Malta, Elizabeth joined him a month later, leaving the one-year-old Charles in the care of his nursery staff and grandparents for five weeks. When she returned, she did not see Charles for another four days.
In their month apart he had taken his first steps and got his first teeth. In 1994, Charles revealed to his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, he felt “emotionally estranged” from his parents and had “yearned for a different kind of affection that they had been unable or unwilling to offer”.
Did the succession of broken marriages among her children reveal something of the legacy of this patchy care? Or should this responsibility be carried by the adult children alone?
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She may not always have got it right — few of us do — but, in 2012, when actress Kate Winslet was awarded a CBE, she told the Queen that she loves being a mum, and the Queen reportedly replied, “Yes. Well, that is the only job”.
In practice, her life showed how very much both motherhood and monarchy mattered to her.
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