Elizabeth II

Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Realms (r. 1952–2022)

  • Born: April 21, 1926
  • Place of Birth: Mayfair, London, United Kingdom
  • Died: September 8, 2022
  • Place of Death: Aberdeenshire, Scotland, United Kingdom

Elizabeth succeeded her father in 1952 to become head of the British Commonwealth, queen of the United Kingdom, and supreme governor of the Church of England. Her reign extended seven decades until her death in 2022. Her reign was credited with keeping the British monarchy intact in the face of global challenges to the British Empire and scandals involving the royal family itself.

Early Life

Elizabeth II was born in 1926 to Prince Albert, the duke of York, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Albert was not the direct heir to the throne and had no expectation of becoming king. However, King Edward VIII, Albert’s older brother, wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, an American woman who had been divorced, which led to his abrupt abdication in 1936. At this point Albert (now George VI) replaced his brother and became king. Elizabeth, the new king’s daughter, was now heir to the throne of the United Kingdom. The anticipated pattern of her life was drastically changed overnight. Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, born in 1930, were educated at home by governess Marion Crawford, under their mother’s supervision. In religion, however, Elizabeth was educated by the archbishop of Canterbury, and she was tutored in history by the provost of Eton College.

During Elizabeth’s teenage years the country was at war, and the princess had to support her parents and set a positive example for her nation’s morale. Although the two princesses were safely accommodated at Windsor Castle, many suggested they be evacuated to Canada, but these suggestions were sternly rejected. In 1945, Elizabeth joined the Women’s Auxiliary and trained as a truck driver.

The future queen would soon meet her consort, her distant cousin, Prince Philip, who was the son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Elizabeth had first met Philip at the age of thirteen. Philip had been educated in Great Britain at Gordonstoun and at Dartmouth. He then entered the Royal Navy in 1939 as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten and served on the HMS Valiant and HMS Whelp. He was naturalized as a British subject, and the couple married on November 20, 1947. Their eldest son and heir to the throne, Prince Charles, was born on November 14, 1948. Their daughter, Anne, was born on August 15, 1950. They had two more children: Prince Andrew, born on August 15, 1960, and Prince Edward, born on March 10, 1964.

Life’s Work

Elizabeth succeeded to the throne on her father’s death on February 6, 1952, and was crowned on June 2, 1953. Her coronation was the first major state occasion to be broadcast live on television, creating a sense of widespread participation that was unprecedented. Although World War II had been over for some years, rationing was just beginning to relax, and the occasion seemed to many people to herald a new era in national life.

By the late 1940s, the former British Empire was breaking up. India, whose addition to the Empire was widely considered the peak moment of Queen Victoria’s monarchy, became independent in 1947, and Elizabeth’s redefined role as head of the Commonwealth embodied a markedly different kind of political and diplomatic symbolism. Her function was to embody and represent, to the extent possible, the affection and respect that Britain’s former colonies were optimistically supposed to retain for the mother country—in effect, to put a lovable face on the sinking wreckage of British imperialism and to smooth over the difficult process of dissolving stubbornly exploitative economic ties.

Elizabeth and Philip’s Commonwealth tour in May 1954 was, in the context of the end of British imperialism, a crucial public relations exercise. It was a great success. Her visit to the United States in 1957, which included an address before the United Nations in New York, also was critical diplomacy. Elizabeth would become the most widely traveled head of state in history. To a remarkable extent, Elizabeth and her mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, continued to maintain the affection and respect they had earned during the war, largely by means of personal charm and diplomatic delicacy.

The next decade saw the birth of Elizabeth and Philip’s last two children. All four siblings would have difficulties attempting to play the roles expected of them as members of the royal family in a modern era. They were subject to contradictory expectations that were greatly exaggerated by increasingly intense media speculation. Prince Philip, too, found it difficult to maintain decorum when every careless remark he made was picked up by reporters. At the center of this maelstrom, however, the queen retained her poise and dignity with complete aplomb. She contrived to maintain something of a personal life in the pursuit of various hobbies, especially breeding dogs, most famously corgis, and breeding and racing horses. Forced to maintain a relentlessly wary dignity and iron reserve in public, she allowed her spontaneous emotions to become manifest in front of a television camera only once, when her filly Highclere won the Prix de Diane (the French Oaks) at Chantilly in 1974. In 1977, Elizabeth celebrated her Silver Jubilee, an event that commemorated her twenty-fifth year as queen.

As the scrutiny of the world’s media gradually turned the life of the royal family into a soap opera, the 1980s and 1990s saw the monarchy face a flood of ridicule. The dignity of the institution became heavily invested in the person of the queen, and Prince Charles, heir to the throne, seemed to lose his worth as successor. The spectacular collapse of Charles’s marriage to Princess Diana was followed by Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris in 1997, which sparked an outburst of national, and international, mourning in which the royal family seemed likely to be cast as the villains. Once again, however, the queen negotiated a way through the potential public relations disaster, even paving the way for Charles to achieve a measure of rehabilitation in his public image. Public perception of the royal family improved further during the early twenty-first century, particularly as many became engrossed in the media coverage surrounding the 2002 celebration of the Golden Jubilee that marked Elizabeth's fiftieth year as queen, the wedding of Prince William, Elizabeth’s grandson, and the subsequent birth of her great-grandchildren. Elizabeth celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, in 2012. Celebrations took place throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth nations.

Five years later, on February 6, 2017, Elizabeth also became the first British monarch in history to celebrate her Sapphire Jubilee, which commemorates sixty-five years as the head of state. While the queen celebrated the anniversary in trademark quiet style, the Royal Mint issued a limited set of new coins to mark the milestone. Additionally, Elizabeth had become the longest reigning living monarch and head of state in the world in October 2016 following the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand.

On April 5, 2020, Elizabeth addressed the United Kingdom regarding the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It was the fifth such address other than her annual Christmas broadcasts that she had made during her reign. Watched by fourteen million television viewers, the queen recalled her first national broadcast, which she and her sister, Princess Margaret, gave over the radio on October 13, 1940, to encourage the Commonwealth's child evacuees who had been sent away from their families during the Nazi bombing campaign known as the Blitz. The Queen reminded her viewers in 2020 that they had faced challenges in the past, and would get through the challenges, including social distancing and separation, of the pandemic “with all nations across the globe in a common endeavor.” At the conclusion of her address, she said, “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again,” recalling a line from a Vera Lynn song that was popular during World War II.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth had simultaneously continued to navigate familial upheaval and turmoil that had started around 2020 with negotiations with her grandson Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, regarding his desire to step back from his duties as a senior royal along with his American wife, Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. Elizabeth arranged a meeting to agree on the terms of this shift as it was unprecedented and could have further impacts on the family. Other scandals also continued to affect the Royal Family during this period; notably, in May 2020, Elizabeth's son, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, withdrew indefinitely from his public duties as a royal after years of controversy related to his association with alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of sexual misconduct against Andrew himself.

While a palace statement following an announcement in February 2021 that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had decided that their departure from royal duties was permanent indicated that Elizabeth would always consider them loved family members, it also related that their honorary military titles and royal patronages were being returned to her for redistribution. After the Duke and Duchess of Sussex participated in a highly publicized, candid interview with Oprah Winfrey in March that covered issues they had experienced with the royal family, including allegations of racism, it was reported that Elizabeth had held further urgent meetings to discuss these issues as well as the possible negative ramifications of the interview on the family, which resulted in a brief official statement. In the midst of this upset, Prince Philip died at the age of ninety-nine on April 9, 2021, and Elizabeth attended his funeral service with family on April 17.

In February 2022, Elizabeth celebrated her Platinum Jubilee, which commemorated her seventieth year as the queen of the United Kingdom. With this event, Elizabeth became the first monarch in the history of Great Britain to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee. This historic feat further distinguished the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, who had become the fourth known monarch in history to rule for longer than seventy years. That same month, Elizabeth tested positive for COVID-19.

Following months of exhaustion and increased mobility issues, Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022, at the age of ninety-six. She died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, her summer residence, with her son Charles and other family members by her side. The news was met by an outpouring of shock and sadness by citizens of Britain, and the international community, as they struggled to comprehend the loss of such a beloved public figure. It was soon announced that her eldest son's official title would be King Charles III.

Significance

Elizabeth’s timetable of public engagements was gradually relaxed in the twenty-first century as she became older, but she continued to perform her official functions with the same imperturbable resolution. In her Christmas television broadcasts she began to introduce an informality and a subtle modification of tone that slowly started a careful metamorphosis of the monarchy’s image. She was able to ameliorate the extent to which the institution seemed blatantly anachronistic and conserve its apparent propriety in an implicitly hostile political environment.

In an era in which it became difficult, in a global context, to respect the institution of monarchy, Elizabeth retained not merely the goodwill but the genuine affection and wholehearted respect of the greater number of her subjects. Another person in her place, less gifted in the intricate artistry of self-control and less skilled in the delicacies of etiquette, might easily have reduced the dignity of the monarchy to negligible levels. By contrast, Elizabeth kept the monarchy largely untarnished and undiminished. It is difficult to imagine that anyone else could have accomplished so much in maintaining a vestige of aristocratic legitimacy in a world of rampant bourgeois capitalism and persistent communist opposition.

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