Queen Elizabeth II was the longest reigning monarch in British history and the longest serving since the death of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, in 1901. She celebrated her silver jubilee in 1977, her golden jubilee in 2002, her diamond jubilee in 2012 and her platinum jubilee this year.
She was born on 21 April 1926 at Bruton Place, London, the home of her maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore. Her father, Albert, Duke of York, was the second son of King George V; her mother, Elizabeth, Duchess of York, was the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
Significantly, for a monarch who during her lifetime was to experience greater social and political change than any of her immediate predecessors, her birth took place during the 1926 general strike. From her early youth, Princess Elizabeth was the most famous child in the world: chocolates, china and hospital wards were named after her, a popular song was composed for her, her face appeared on a Newfoundland stamp and a slice of Antarctica became Princess Elizabeth Land. Yet, at home in the nursery, she developed into an orderly, self-contained, disciplined child, the responsible elder sister to Princess Margaret (born 1930).
Her childhood was happy and secure, with fond parents and the opportunity to indulge her love of dogs and horses. But everything changed when, in December 1936, her uncle, Edward VIII, abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Princess Elizabeth’s father became king as George VI and she herself heir presumptive to the British throne. The family moved into Buckingham Palace, surrounded by the panoply and restrictions of British royalty.
Princess Elizabeth and her sister spent the duration of the Second World War at Windsor Castle where they were sent for safety as London came under attack from Luftwaffe bombing raids. They were educated in the far from rigorous manner of upper-class children of the day by a governess, Marion Crawford, although Elizabeth, in view of her future role, was taught excellent French and had lessons in British constitutional history from the vice-provost of Eton, Sir Henry Marten (the story goes that the absent-minded Sir Henry, fresh from teaching the boys in the college below the castle, sometimes addressed the future Queen as “gentlemen”).
Her parents saw to it that she met and entertained important visitors such as US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and General Dwight D Eisenhower, as part of her future training, and on her 16th birthday she took on her first ceremonial role, being installed as honorary colonel of the Grenadier Guards. In the last months of the war, she took a course in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which involved learning to drive a truck, change its tyres and understand the working of the engine. She prided herself on being a fast, skilful driver.
Princess Elizabeth’s worldwide public debut came at the time of her 21st birthday on 21 April 1947 on her first tour outside England, a state visit with her parents and sister to the Union of South Africa, then still a self-governing dominion and part of the British Empire. The post-war years saw the break-up of the Empire and the beginning of its transformation into the Commonwealth, an association of former colonies and dominions with the British monarch at its head.
In what was to become her best-known broadcast, the young princess dedicated herself to the service of the Empire and Commonwealth: “I can make my solemn act of dedication now,” she said. “I declare… that my whole life… shall be devoted to your service, and the service of the great imperial family to which we all belong.” The pledge she gave that day remained a constant for her. As head of the Commonwealth, her devotion to the organisation was lifelong.
In November of that same year, she married the former Prince Philip of Greece, who became Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Philip was the son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg and related to Princess Elizabeth through both his maternal and paternal bloodlines. Through collateral descendants of George III, he was her fourth cousin once removed. The marriage was the first royal festival in grey post-war Britain, then in the grip of an austerity regime. Winston Churchill called the wedding “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel”.
Within a year of her wedding, Princess Elizabeth had given birth to her heir, Prince Charles, born 14 November 1948, and two years later, Princess Anne, born 15 August 1950. For two years, she and her husband enjoyed the freedom of naval life in Malta, where he was a serving officer, but the grave illness of the king brought an end to this brief period of normality. Princess Elizabeth had to deputise for her father on many ceremonial occasions in the summer of 1950 and familiarised herself with state papers.
In the autumn of 1951, she and Prince Philip visited Canada and the US for the first time. On that tour, the princess’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, had travelled with the papers covering the princess’s accession under his bed. On 6 February 1952, when the princess and her husband were in Kenya, the king died suddenly in his sleep. His daughter succeeded him as Queen Elizabeth II and was crowned the following year as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Queen of her other Realms and Territories and Head of the Commonwealth. Her coronation on 2 June 1953 was televised, sparking the beginning of a media revolution as millions in Britain and around the world watched the ceremony. There was huge public enthusiasm for the young Queen who seemed to represent both a link with the historic past and a new future. Churchill, her prime minister at the time, predicted a new Elizabethan age. Bernard Baruch called her “the world’s sweetheart”.
With her handsome husband and two young children, the Queen was held up as a moral example and the idealised representative of family virtues. This concept of the monarchy, which in later years was to rebound against it, was spelt out in 1955 by The Times, then still very much the voice of the establishment, when it thundered against the proposed marriage between Princess Margaret and group captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man:
“Now in the 20th-century conception of the monarchy the Queen has come to be the symbol of every side of life of this society, its universal representative in whom her people see their better selves ideally reflected; and since part of their ideal is family life, the Queen’s family has its own part in the reflection.”
Yet by the popular press at the time, Princess Margaret’s renunciation of Townsend on the grounds of duty and religion was seen as a forced sacrifice to outmoded concepts, which, by implication, included the monarchy.
Post-imperial disillusionment with the establishment after the failed Suez expedition in 1956 brought the first criticisms of the court and even the Queen herself. In August 1957, Lord Altrincham attacked the court for being “tweedy”, failing to live with the times and identifying the monarchy with a narrow aristocratic class. The same “second-rate” courtiers were responsible for the “prim little sermons” that the Queen delivered in the style of a “priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect and a recent candidate for confirmation”.
Dancing with her then-fiance, Philip Mountbatten, at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh
No change had taken place in the palace ethos, he (correctly) claimed, since the reign of the Queen’s father. Yet, in the prevailing atmosphere of royal worship, his sentiments caused national outrage and he himself was physically attacked. The broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge analysed the current passion for the royal family as “the royal soap opera … a sort of substitute or ersatz religion”. He was banned from the BBC. Yet the social revolution that was taking place in late-Fifties and early-Sixties Britain could not fail to have its effect on attitudes towards an unmodernised monarchy. The Queen was shocked when in 1963, for the first time, she was booed by left-wing demonstrators during the visit of Greece’s King Paul and his German wife, Queen Frederika, who were regarded as unacceptably right-wing.
The same period saw the diminution of the royal prerogative in one significant area. In constitutional theory, the monarch has the right to appoint the prime minister but, by the end of the 20th century, this exercise of the prerogative had for all practical purposes ceased to exist. A succession of prime ministers offered the Queen little choice. When Churchill resigned in 1955, the fact that Anthony Eden had long been regarded as his political heir apparent, made it inevitable that the Queen would appoint him as his successor.
Two years later, the Queen’s reluctance to enter the political arena left the choice in effect to her private secretary, Michael Adeane, in consultation with ruling Conservative grandees. The Labour Party then announced that parties should decide their own leaders, an option later followed by the Tories in 1965, which, although designed to save the Queen the embarrassment of having to choose between rival claimants to the leadership of a party, effectively removed the element of royal choice. This was prompted by the machinations of Harold Macmillan at the time of his resignation in October 1963 when, determined to block the succession of RA “Rab” Butler, he put forward the candidature of Alec Douglas-Home. The Queen’s acceptance of Macmillan’s scheme to favour the aristocratic Earl of Home over the meritocratic Butler, has been described as the biggest political misjudgement of her reign; she was seen as the instrument of a “magic circle” of Conservative grandees.
As the Queen’s experience of public affairs grew immeasurably over the long duration of her reign, the most important aspect of her role, “to consult, advise and warn” her prime ministers, did not diminish. During the early years of her rule, her conversations with Churchill often turned on their mutual interest for racing; although the aristocratic, Foreign Office-trained Eden took a more aloof attitude, the Queen was kept informed of all aspects of the Suez Crisis, including the secret agreements with France and Israel to attack Egypt.
Winston Churchill and the Queen at the opening of the International Youth Centre at Chigwell, Essex, 12 July 1951
Her quiet self-possession in the face of crisis, her dignity, patriotism, strong sense of duty and utter dedication to what she saw as her job, has earned her a place as one of the great monarchs
