‘Well, she’s it, really, isn’t she, I mean, she’s the Realm…’
A member of the crowd outside Westminster Abbey for the wedding of Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson on 27 July 1986, explaining that she had come to see the Queen, not the bridal couple
‘I have always so behaved myself that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects.’
Elizabeth I
‘The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of kings is unsearchable.’
Proverbs 23.5
CONSIDER FOR YOURSELF if what follows is a fairy tale.
Here is a baby girl, tiny, with cowlicks of pale hair.
Here is the prince, her father: sensitive in appearance, though emotionally undemonstrative; orthodox in his tastes for shooting, hunting and tennis; a nervous man who stammers, afraid of his parents, impeccably dressed. Her mother is a smiling, dimple-cheeked woman, indelibly patrician. Her tiny feet are the delight of female journalists, like the columnist in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette who, in June 1934, informs her readers that few women can compete with her ‘for daintiness of feet and ankles’.1 To one another father and mother are Bertie and Elizabeth, to the world at large a royal duke and duchess, and admired. Sugary reverence is the keynote of their record in broadsheets, illustrated papers and the fledgling medium of the cinema newsreel. It will remain so.
In the background a king and queen, the baby’s paternal grandparents. They are everything a king and queen ought to be in 1926: earnest, unfashionable, imperturbably convinced of royalty’s mission; dutiful, modest and intellectually unremarkable; concerned by the barbarism of the age and overstretched tentacles of British might that wind about the globe; preoccupied less constructively with minutiae of dress, and the horrors of jazz music and nail polish. Castles and palaces are home to them, as they shall be to Bertie and Elizabeth and their newborn daughter. Millions on millions acclaim them, for this king is also an emperor, global sovereign over men and women of myriad faiths and ethnicities – as his granddaughter shall be, though she will inherit only tatters of Empire and a hope for the future.
In time, in the best storyteller’s tradition, the baby will acquire through marriage a sable-haired aunt, who is vilified and banished: the equivalent of a wicked stepmother whose shadow darkens her childhood and changes the course of her life. Later, she herself will marry a handsome prince from across the seas. His name, Philip, means ‘lover of horses’, her other passion, and their marriage, that lasts into its eighth decade, will support her into her mid-nineties. She will ride in a golden coach; diamonds will sparkle in her hair; hospitals, sports centres, a luxury liner, Parisian flower market, chocolate mints and a pale-flowered rhododendron, and global initiatives targeting leadership, blindness and forestry conservation will bear her name. Her sons and grandsons will marry beautiful women. And, late in life, the Vatican will bestow upon her a medieval-sounding epithet, ‘the last Christian monarch’, that smudges the boundaries between the sacred and the secular to raise her above the epoch-changing squabbles of statesmen.2 Books will be written about her, films and plays. In a television drama called The Crown, a writer who dismisses her as ‘a countryside woman of limited intelligence’, occupying a ‘theme park’ of ‘grown men with spurs and breastplates’, will fictionalize her reign, muddying fact with distortion.3 From infancy she will occupy public and private worlds. In her lifetime her fame will eclipse that of Augustus, Napoleon, even Hitler; her image will imprint coins, stamps and, apparently, the nation’s dreams. Her legacy will be less bloody than those of history’s ‘great’ men, less ambitious, without vainglory.
The fairy godmother at her cradle grants her long life, earthly riches, an equable disposition, stamina, humility and love; she bestows conservative instincts. With age comes wisdom and moral authority. In lesser measure the baby inherits her mother’s steel, her father’s temper, caution and stubbornness, both parents’ deep religious convictions.
The baby born by Caesarean section in the early hours of 21 April 1926, after a day of rain, is baptised five weeks later in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. She is Princess Elizabeth of York. She will become, as she swears at the meeting of her Accession Council on 8 February 1952, Elizabeth the Second by the Grace of God of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, Defender of the Faith. Her names are those of her mother, great-grandmother and grandmother, a family inheritance as well as her first (unknowing) encounter with that philosophy of continuity so dear to royalty. George V and Queen Mary are her grandparents. The name of the wicked aunt is Wallis, wrong on so many counts.
If a fairy tale requires a prophecy, in the late spring of 1926 sections of the media unite in their clairvoyance. The silent Pathé news bulletin that records her birth is filmed in black and white. Its promise is simple but startling: ‘Queen of Hearts To-day, She may one day be Queen of England’. The Daily Sketch informs its readers ‘a possible Queen of England was born yesterday’.
And so, as we have seen, it comes to pass – despite the baby’s sex, her father’s status as a king’s second son and the good health of the uncle who ought to displace both father and daughter: Edward, Prince of Wales, so briefly and dramatically Edward VIII. The National Anthem’s prayer for her protection is granted: hers becomes the nation’s longest reign. Into a third millennium she perpetuates a model of monarchy traceable to her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Let us agree at the outset that Elizabeth II’s life story is not a fairy tale. Stripped of the bombast of former centuries, royal rhetoric in Elizabeth’s lifetime has celebrated the idea of a reigning family of ordinary people in extraordinary positions. This is the Elizabeth II who, in 1982, told housewives in Sheffield that she, too, found it difficult to keep her floors clean; who, in 1990, requested designer John Anderson to shorten the neckline of a coat, given her diminutive stature; who, at a low point in royal fortunes, asked for clemency from press and public, and, in 2000, told viewers of her Christmas broadcast that ‘the framework in which I try to lead my life’ is one available to many millions: Christ’s teachings. ‘We do not want the Queen to be one of us,’ wrote the women’s editor of the Reading Evening Post in February 1991, ‘but we do want her to be with us.’4 For seven decades, despite media intrusiveness on a scale unprecedented in royal history, she has balanced this requirement of accessibility with distance, the white-gloved hand extended in greeting.
At the time of the thirtieth anniversary of her accession, the Daily Mirror pointed out that Elizabeth had ‘lived a life of great privilege, but has never known the privilege of privacy which most of us enjoy’.5 She has suggested she must be seen to be believed: unlike the widowed Queen Victoria, she has always been more than a diligent deskworker, concealed from view behind the scenes. Acclaimed in 1953 as ‘the focal point of loyalty, justice, mercy, integrity’, she has consistently worked to retain, and merit, this role as she understands it, aware that her status is inherited, respect and affection earned; and she rates highly her position as fountain of honour, symbolically rewarding integrity in others through the honours system at palace investitures.6 The authors of The Queen Elizabeth Coronation Book described her as ‘a combination of master and servant to [her] peoples’; her priority has been her servantship. Famously, at the age of twenty-one she dedicated herself to the service of a nation and its ‘imperial family’. ‘It was an incredible thing,’ reflected her cousin Margaret Rhodes in 2015, ‘to envisage a whole life ahead of you, where your own choices are not followed, where you know what you are going to be doing every day of the week for months ahead and where spontaneity goes out of the window.’
After seven decades, it is possible to see the considerable changes the monarchy has undergone on Elizabeth’s watch. She is a cautious innovator, who regards her unique inheritance with respect. Nothing in her upbringing or the training she received from her father challenged her innate conservatism: indeed, so strong was the expectation among her first advisers, politicians, the press and many of the public that she perpetuate her father and grandfather’s models of kingship that real opportunities for innovation were few, even had she so inclined. One result was that, from quite early in her reign, she was disparaged as old-fashioned. Over time, this judgement shifted. For many years, Elizabeth’s fidelity to timeless (or old-fashioned) values has made her a figure of reassurance in our national life, a still point in the vortex of change, and more progressive views than hers have wilted in the face of her straightforward homilies that, for example, ‘matters of the spirit are more important and more lasting than simple material development’.7 She has outlived national habits of deference and ignored the culture of celebrity, evanescent and meretricious. She has maintained the crown’s eminence and, like all her successful predecessors, humanized her own sovereignty just enough: when, in April 1960, twenty-two-year-old Mary Smith of Plumstead wrote to Elizabeth to request her intervention in revoking her husband’s sentence for murder, she did so ‘as one mother to another’.8 She has not faltered in good behaviour, her deep religious faith or an unyielding sense of duty inherited from her parents and grandparents, and shared, until his death, by her husband, with the result that, as television commentary claimed at the time of her silver wedding anniversary, she is for many ‘a non-governing monarch as powerful in her spiritual influence and example as any absolute tyrant of the past’.
Constitutional proprieties do not favour adventurous, fanciful monarchs. Overwhelmingly Elizabeth has accepted the constraints of her position. Her political neutrality is rigorous, and her subjects are content that her role as head of state occupy fewer of her public energies than that of head of the nation. She is not, however, wholly a passive figure. Presumably with her agreement, her closest advisors have been active in defending the crown’s surviving powers. These include the convention known as Queen’s consent that requires ministers to give notice of legislation likely to affect either the crown’s private interests or the royal prerogative, ahead of parliamentary debate. ‘I must protest most strongly at not being consulted at an earlier stage, in accordance with the rules which are clearly laid down’, wrote her private secretary on one occasion when prior consultation had not been granted.9 In her private life, her granddaughter Princess Beatrice of York has testified to her ‘overwhelming curiosity’: ‘every day she’s curious to learn something new, to do something new’; favoured royal architect Hugh Casson noted ‘her very definite views’, in his case on everything from door handles to lampshades.10 Elizabeth’s approach to her guardianship of the Commonwealth, for example, has been of her own devising. Her affection for and abiding interest in this global agglomeration of former imperial territories, inspired by her belief that ‘the most important contact between nations is usually contact between peoples’, has been key to its survival and its growth from nine to fifty-four nations. Fifteen of these independent territories retain Elizabeth as their queen. Alone among the world’s monarchs, her prominence is global.
In 1972, Thames Television told viewers, ‘In a line stretching back over a thousand years, no monarch has been more loved and no monarch more esteemed.’ It is a statement to provoke unease among modern audiences. It is also, for many, many of Elizabeth II’s subjects, true.