essay on queen elizabeth 2

Queen Elizabeth II

Queen Elizabeth II was the longest-reigning monarch in British history, sitting on the throne for 71 years. She was succeeded by King Charles III in 2022.

Who Was Queen Elizabeth II?

Quick facts, early life and family tree, ascension to the crown and coronation, husband prince philip, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, family scandals and losses, death and funeral, latest news: one year since her death.

On the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, King Charles shared an unreleased photo of the late queen. “In marking the first anniversary of Her late Majesty’s death and my Accession, we recall with great affection her long life, devoted service and all she meant to so many of us,” he said in a statement. Additionally, Prince William and Princess Kate attended a private church service in Wales to commemorate her life, and Prince Harry visited the chapel at Windsor Castle , where the queen is buried. Planning for a memorial to Elizabeth is underway. The targeted unveiling is 2026, the year she would have turned 100.

Queen Elizabeth II became queen of the United Kingdom on February 6, 1952, at age 25 and was crowned on June 2, 1953. She was the mother of Prince Charles , who ascended to the throne after her death, as well as the grandmother of Princes William and Harry . As the longest-serving monarch in British history, she tried to make her reign more modern and sensitive to a changing public while maintaining traditions associated with the crown. Elizabeth died on September 8, 2022, at age 96.

FULL NAME: Elizabeth Alexandra Mary BORN: April 21, 1926 DIED: September 8, 2022 BIRTHPLACE: London, England, United Kingdom PARENTS: King George VI and Queen Mother Elizabeth SPOUSE: Prince Philip CHILDREN: King Charles III , Princess Anne , Prince Andrew , and Prince Edward ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Queen Elizabeth II was born Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary on April 21, 1926, in London. Her parents were then known as the Duke and Duchess of York. Prince Albert—later known as King George VI —was the second son of Queen Mary and King George V . Her mother was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon .

Elizabeth had ties with most of the monarchs in Europe. Her British ancestors include Queen Victoria (ruled 1837 to 1901) and King George III (ruled 1760 to 1820).

At the time of her birth, most people didn’t realize Elizabeth would someday become the queen of the United Kingdom. Nicknamed Lilibet, she got to enjoy the first decade of her life with all the privileges of being a royal without the pressures of being the heir apparent.

Elizabeth’s father and mother divided their time between a home in London and Royal Lodge, the family’s home on the grounds of Windsor Great Park. Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret , were educated at home by tutors. Academic courses included French, mathematics, and history, along with dancing, singing, and art lessons.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Elizabeth and her sister largely stayed out of London, having been relocated to Windsor Castle. From there she made the first of her famous radio broadcasts in 1940, with this particular speech reassuring the children of Britain who had been evacuated from their homes and families. The 14-year-old princess, showing her calm and firm personality, told them “that in the end, all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace.”

Elizabeth soon started taking on other public duties. Appointed colonel-in-chief of the Grenadier Guards by her father, Elizabeth made her first public appearance inspecting the troops in 1942. She also began to accompany her parents on official visits within Britain.

In 1945, Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service to help in the war effort. She trained side-by-side with other British women to be an expert driver and mechanic. While her volunteer work only lasted a few months, it offered Elizabeth a glimpse into a different, non-royal world. She had another vivid experience outside of the monarchy when she and Margaret were allowed to mingle anonymously among the citizenry on Victory in Europe Day .

When Elizabeth’s grandfather King George V died in 1936, his eldest son (Elizabeth’s uncle) became King Edward VIII . Edward, however, was in love with American divorcée Wallis Simpson and had to choose between the crown and his heart . In the end, Edward chose Simpson and abdicated the crown.

The event changed the course of Elizabeth’s life, making her the heir presumptive to the British crown. Her father was crowned King George VI in 1937, taking on the name George to emphasize continuity with his father. Her mother became Queen Elizabeth.

Fifteen years later, the monarchy changed hands again when King George died. The younger Elizabeth assumed the responsibilities of the ruling monarch on February 6, 1952. At that point, the 25-year-old became Queen Elizabeth II, and her mother became Queen Mother.

Elizabeth was crowned on June 2, 1953, in Westminster Abbey, at the age of 27. For the first time ever, the coronation ceremony was broadcast on television, allowing people from across the globe to witness the pomp and spectacle of the event.

Elizabeth married her distant cousin Philip Mountbatten (a surname adopted from his mother’s side) on November 20, 1947, at London’s Westminster Abbey.

Elizabeth first met Philip, son of Prince Andrew of Greece, when she was only 13. She was smitten with him from the start. The two kept in touch over the years and eventually fell in love.

They made an unusual pair. Elizabeth was quiet and reserved, while Philip was boisterous and outspoken. Her father, King George, was hesitant about the match because, while Mountbatten had ties to both the Danish and Greek royal families, he didn’t possess great wealth and was considered by some to have a rough personality.

At the time of their wedding, Great Britain was still recovering from the ravages of World War II, and Elizabeth collected clothing coupons to get fabric for her gown.

The family took on the name Windsor, a move pushed by her mother and Prime Minister Winston Churchill that caused tension with her husband. In 1960, she reversed course, issuing orders that her descendants who didn’t carry royal titles (or needed last names for legal purposes such as weddings) would use the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. Over the years, Philip inspired numerous public relations headaches with his off-the-cuff, controversial comments and rumors of possible infidelities.

Philip died on April 9, 2021, at age 99. Days later, Prince Andrew told the media Queen Elizabeth described his death “as having left a huge void in her life.” She had previously said he was her “strength and stay.”

Elizabeth and Philip wasted no time in producing an heir: Their son Charles was born in 1948, the year after their wedding, and their daughter, Anne , arrived in 1950. As queen, Elizabeth had two more children—sons Andrew and Edward —in 1960 and 1964, respectively.

King Charles III

In 1969, Elizabeth officially made Charles her successor by granting him the title of Prince of Wales. Hundreds of millions of people tuned in to see the ceremony on television.

In 1981, Charles, then 32, wed 19-year-old Diana Spencer, who became known as Princess Diana . The wedding drew enormous crowds in the streets of London, and millions watched the proceedings on television. Public opinion of the monarchy was especially strong at that time. Later, rumors surfaced that he was pressured into the marriage by his family.

Now King Charles III, he is married to Queen Camilla .

Princess Anne

Princess Anne began working as a member of the royal family when she was 18 in 1969 and continues today. She is also heavily involved in charity work. A noted equestrian, Anne competed in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. Her mother opened the Games that year, and the rest of the royal family traveled to support Anne.

Previously married to Captain Mark Phillips, she and her current husband, Timothy Laurence, wed in 1992.

Prince Andrew

Andrew was the first child born to a reigning monarch in more than 100 years. In 1979, he joined the British Royal Navy, became a helicopter pilot, and served during the Falkland War in the early 1980s. He became the Duke of York after marrying Sarah Ferguson , though the couple later divorced. Following scandal, Andrew stepped back from public duties in his royal capacity in 2019, a decision that was made permanent in 2022.

Prince Edward

The queen’s youngest child, Edward, worked in theater and television production for many years, at one point through his own production company. Since 2002, he has worked full-time supporting his mother and now brother. Edward is married to Sophie Rhys-Jones. He became the Duke of Edinburgh—a title previously held by his father—in March 2023.

Queen Elizabeth had eight grandchildren and was great-grandmother to 12 in her lifetime.

Her most well-known grandchildren are Charles and Diana’s sons, Prince William , who became second-in-line to the throne at his birth in 1982, and Prince Harry , born in 1984. Elizabeth emerged as a devoted grandmother to her grandsons. Prince William has said that she offered invaluable support and guidance as he and Kate Middleton planned their 2011 wedding.

In addition to Princes William and Harry, the queen’s other grandchildren are: Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, born to Princess Anne; Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York, born to Prince Andrew; and Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn, born to Prince Edward. Peter is Elizabeth’s oldest grandchild; he was born in 1977, four years before his sister and five years before Prince William.

William and Kate have three children, who are Elizabeth’s great-grandchildren. The Prince and Princess of Wales welcomed Prince George Alexander Louis in July 2013, Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana in May 2015, and Prince Louis Arthur Charles in April 2018. All three are currently in the line of succession directly after their father.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and his wife, Meghan Markle gave the queen two more great-grandchildren with the birth of their son, Prince Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor , and daughter, Princess Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor , in May 2019 and June 2021, respectively.

Elizabeth’s other great-grandchildren include Savannah Phillips, Isla Phillips, Mia Tindall, Lena Tindall, August Brooksbank, Lucas Tindall, and Sienna Mozzi.

Elizabeth’s long and mainly peaceful reign was marked by vast changes in her people’s lives, in her country’s power, how Britain is viewed abroad, and how the monarchy is regarded and portrayed. As a constitutional monarch, Elizabeth didn’t weigh in on political matters, nor did she reveal her political views. However, she conferred regularly with her prime ministers.

When Elizabeth became queen, post-war Britain still had a substantial empire, dominions, and dependencies. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, many of these countries achieved independence, and the British Empire evolved into the Commonwealth of Nations. Elizabeth II thus made visits to other countries as head of the Commonwealth and a representative of Britain, including a groundbreaking trip to Germany in 1965. She became the first British monarch to make a state visit there in more than five decades.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Elizabeth continued to travel extensively. In 1973, she attended the Commonwealth Conference in Ottawa, Canada and, in 1976, traveled to the United States for the 200 th anniversary celebration of America’s independence from Britain. More than a week later, she was in Montreal to open the Summer Olympics. In 1979, she traveled to Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which garnered international attention and widespread respect.

In 1982, Elizabeth worried about her second son, Prince Andrew , who served as a helicopter pilot in the British Royal Navy during the Falklands War. Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a clash that lasted for several weeks. While more than 250 British soldiers died in the conflict, Prince Andrew returned home safe and well, much to his mother’s relief.

In 2011, Elizabeth showed that the crown still had symbolic and diplomatic power when she became the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland since 1911 (when all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom).

As queen, Elizabeth modernized the monarchy, dropping some of its formalities and making certain sites and treasures more accessible to the public. As Britain and other nations struggled financially, Britain abolished the Civil List in 2012, which was a public funding system of the monarchy dating back roughly 250 years. The royal family continues to receive some government support, but the queen cut back on spending.

Also in 2012, Elizabeth celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, marking 60 years as queen. As part of the jubilee festivities, a special BBC concert was held on June 4 featuring the likes of Shirley Bassey , Paul McCartney , Tom Jones , Stevie Wonder , and Kylie Minogue. Elizabeth was surrounded by family at this historic event, including her husband Philip, son Charles, and grandsons Harry and William.

On September 9, 2015, she surpassed her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest-ruling monarch, who reigned for 63 years.

Despite the occasional call to step aside for Charles, Elizabeth remained steadfast in her royal obligations as she passed her 90 th birthday in 2016. She continued making more than 400 engagements per year, maintaining her support of hundreds of charitable organizations and programs.

On February 6, 2017, the queen celebrated 65 years on the throne, the only British monarch to ever celebrate her Sapphire Jubilee. The date also marks the anniversary of the death of her father. The queen chose to spend the day quietly at Sandringham, her country estate north of London, where she attended a church service. In London, there were royal gun salutes at Green Park and at the Tower of London to mark the occasion. The Royal Mint also issued eight new commemorative coins in honor of the queen’s Sapphire Jubilee.

Later that year, the monarchy took what was considered a major step toward transitioning to the next generation: On November 12, Charles handled the traditional Remembrance Sunday duty of placing a wreath at the Cenotaph war memorial, as the queen watched from a nearby balcony.

In August 2019, Elizabeth made a rare intrusion into political matters when she agreed to a request by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to suspend Parliament until October 14, less than three weeks before Britain’s planned departure from the European Union.

In 2022, the nation celebrated Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee year. Another milestone for the monarchy, it marked her 70 years on the throne.

Relationship With Prime Ministers

Elizabeth had 15 prime ministers placed into power during her reign, with the queen and PM having a weekly, confidential meeting. (Elizabeth also met about a quarter of all the U.S. presidents in history, most recently receiving Joe Biden for a state visit in June 2021.)

She enjoyed a father-figure relationship with the iconic Winston Churchill and was later able to loosen up a bit and be somewhat informal with Labour leaders Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. In contrast, she and Margaret Thatcher had a very formal, distant relationship, with the PM tending to be a grating lecturer to the queen on a variety of issues.

Tony Blair saw certain concepts around the monarchy as somewhat outdated, though he did appreciate Elizabeth making a public statement after the death of Princess Diana .

Later, Conservative leader David Cameron, who was Elizabeth’s fifth cousin removed, enjoyed a warm rapport with the queen. He apologized in 2014 for revealing in a conversation that she was against the Scottish referendum to seek independence from Great Britain.

Theresa May was described as being tight-lipped about Brexit plans to leave the European Union, with a rumor circulating that Elizabeth was perturbed over not being informed about future exit strategies.

Two days before her death, Elizabeth welcomed her final prime minister, Liz Truss , at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. The September 6, 2022, meeting was her final act as monarch.

Threats to Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family

Elizabeth worked tirelessly to protect the image of the monarchy and to prepare for its future. But she saw the monarchy come under attack during her lifetime. The once-revered institution weathered a number of storms, including death threats against the royal family.

In 1979, Elizabeth suffered a significant personal loss when Lord Mountbatten, her husband’s uncle, died in a terrorist bombing. Mountbatten and several members of his family were aboard his boat off the west coast of Ireland when the vessel exploded on August 27. He and three others, including one of his grandsons, were killed. The Irish Republican Army, which opposed British rule in Northern Ireland, took responsibility for the attack.

In June 1981, Elizabeth herself had a dangerous encounter. She was riding in the Trooping the Colour, a special military parade to celebrate her official birthday when a man in the crowd pointed a gun at her. He fired, but fortunately, the gun was loaded with blanks. Other than receiving a good scare, the queen wasn’t hurt.

Elizabeth had an even closer call the following year when an intruder broke into Buckingham Palace and confronted her in her bedroom. When the press got wind of the fact that Prince Philip was nowhere to be seen during this incident, they speculated about the state of the royal marriage.

The marriage of Elizabeth’s son Charles to Diana made headlines for years before the couple announced their separation in 1992, followed by their formal divorce in 1996. In the wake of Diana’s death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, Elizabeth experienced intense media scrutiny. Her incredibly popular ex-daughter-in-law had been called the “People’s Princess.”

The queen was at her Balmoral estate in Scotland with Charles and his sons with Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, at the time. For days, Elizabeth remained silent while the country mourned Diana’s passing, and she was sharply criticized for her lack of response.

Stories circulated that the queen didn’t want to give Diana a royal funeral, which only fueled public sentiment against the monarch. Nearly a week after Diana’s death, Elizabeth returned to London and issued a statement on the late princess.

Elizabeth also initially objected to the relationship between her son Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles . Charles and Camilla had dated years before he met his family, but the relationship ended under family pressure, only to resume during Charles and Diana’s marriage. Known to be a stickler for ceremony and tradition, she eventually showed signs of softening her stance over the years. When Charles and Camilla wed in 2005, Elizabeth and Prince Philip didn’t attend the civil ceremony but attended a religious blessing and held a reception in their honor at Windsor Castle.

In 1992, another of Elizabeth’s children, Prince Andrew, ended up in the tabloids after photos emerged of his wife, Sarah Ferguson , and another man engaged in romantic activity. The couple divorced soon after. Along with the dissolution of Charles’ and Andrew’s marriages, Princess Anne divorced her husband Mark Phillips that year. More bad news came when a fire broke out at Windsor Castle in November. The 15-hour blaze destroyed 115 rooms, though it only consumed two pieces of art from the queen’s valuable private collection. The year became known as her “annus horribilis.”

After the start of the 21 st century, Elizabeth experienced two great losses. She said goodbye to both her sister, Margaret, and her mother in 2002, the same year she celebrated her Golden Jubilee that marked her 50 th year on the throne. Margaret, known for being more of an adventurous soul than other royals and who was barred from marrying an early love, died in February after suffering a stroke. Only a few weeks later, Elizabeth’s mother died at Royal Lodge on March 30 at the age of 101.

In November 2017, the media reported the queen had some $13 million invested in offshore accounts. The news came following the leak of the so-called “Paradise Papers” to a German newspaper, which shared the documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The Duchy of Lancaster, which holds assets for the queen, confirmed that some of its investments were overseas accounts but insisted they were all legitimate.

Also in 2017, the former owner of the lingerie company Rigby & Peller, which had serviced Elizabeth for more than 50 years, wrote a tell-all autobiography that included some of her experiences with the royal family. Although the author insisted that “the book doesn’t contain anything naughty,” the queen responded in early 2018 by revoking Rigby & Peller’s royal warrant.

In 2019, Prince Andrew was forced to step down from public duties, following a media firestorm. Andrew had courted years of scandal surrounding his controversial business pursuits and friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein ,

Just weeks later, in January 2020, the family again found themselves in the spotlight, following the bombshell decision by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle , the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, to step away from their roles as senior royals.

For much of her life, the queen surrounded herself with dogs. She was especially known for her love of corgis, owning more than 30 descendants of the first corgi she received as a teenager, until the death of the final one, Willow, in 2018.

Elizabeth was also a horse enthusiast who bred thoroughbreds and attended racing events for many years.

Not one for the spotlight, Elizabeth liked quiet pastimes. She enjoyed reading mysteries, working on crossword puzzles, and reportedly, even watching wrestling on television.

Queen Elizabeth II died peacefully at her Balmoral estate in Scotland on September 8, 2022, at 3:10 p.m. local time. She was 96 years old. Her official cause of death was old age, according to her death certificate.

The public was first aware of the queen’s ill health earlier that day when Buckingham Palace issued at statement around 12:30 p.m. that said, “Following further evaluation this morning, the queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision.”

Soon, members of the royal family began traveling to see the queen. At the time of her death, Prince Charles and Camilla, as well as Princess Anne were at the castle. William, Harry, Andrew, Edward, and Sophie arrived later in the evening. Kate Middleton didn’t travel to say her final goodbyes, citing the recent start of the school year for her children. Meghan Markle was also absent.

Her death was publicly announced at 6:30 p.m. After, newly minted King Charles issued a statement that said:

The death of my beloved Mother, Her Majesty The Queen, is a moment of the greatest sadness for me and all members of my family. We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished Sovereign and a much-loved Mother. I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country, the Realms and the Commonwealth, and by countless people around the world. During this period of mourning and change, my family and I will be comforted and sustained by our knowledge of the respect and deep affection in which The Queen was so widely held.

On September 14, Elizabeth’s coffin traveled from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall by horse-drawn carriage and lay in state for four days. The day of her state funeral, September 19, was declared a bank holiday. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey and ended with two minutes of silence, observed there and throughout the United Kingdom.

President Joe Biden , First Lady Jill Biden , French President Emmanuel Macron , and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were among the dozens of world leaders and 2,000 total people in attendance. Millions more watched or listened in; the funeral was broadcast on TV and radio and streamed on YouTube. Elizabeth’s pony and her corgis, Muick and Sandy, watched the procession, as did tens of thousands of people.

A private burial came later that day. Elizabeth was buried with Prince Philip at the King George VI Memorial Chapel.

• I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
• 1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an “annus horribilis.”
• When life seems hard, the courageous do not lie down and accept defeat; instead, they are all the more determined to struggle for a better future.
• Discrimination still exists. Some people feel that their own beliefs are being threatened. Some are unhappy about unfamiliar cultures. They all need to be reassured that there is so much to be gained by reaching out to others; that diversity is indeed a strength and not a threat.
• Grief is the price we pay for love.
• I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do something else, I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.
• In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognize how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.
• We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

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The Lasting Legacy of Queen Elizabeth II

The longest-reigning British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II was a much-loved figure in the United Kingdom and across the world. She passed away peacefully at Balmoral Castle in Scotland at age 96 on Sept. 8, 2022, after having recently marked 70 years on the throne.

During her lifetime, the queen witnessed pivotal moments in history and interacted with many key figures who shaped global events, including prime ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher .

Born in 1926, the queen was a direct descendant of many famed British rulers including King James VI , Mary Queen of Scots, and King Robert II of Scotland . Yet the royal system she was born into was very different from that of her ancestors. In fact, the queen — then Princess Elizabeth — and her family faced a series of crises that would determine whether the monarchy, or indeed the United Kingdom, would survive.

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The Life of Queen Elizabeth II

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Influenced by king george vi.

During the Second World War , the future looked bleak for Britain when the Nazi regime mounted a heavy bombing campaign that became known as the Blitz. Targeting British civilians, landmarks, and indeed virtually anything in sight, German bombers did their utmost to make British cities — especially London — a living hell for residents. In addition, German U-Boats lurking in the Atlantic sought to cut off supplies from the British Isles.

Despite the acute danger posed by the bombings, the queen’s father, King George VI, chose to remain with his people instead of fleeing to a safe location. When it was suggested that the family take refuge elsewhere, his wife, the queen mother, famously said: “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the king. And the king will never leave.”

All in all, the king took a hands-on role in his approach to leadership — he visited the armed forces, used the radio to encourage the British public and constantly traveled to bombed locations, hospitals and factories. His dignified yet down-to-earth royal presence proved a major boost to British morale.

The king’s example had a major influence on his daughter Elizabeth, who gave her first public address to child war refugees via radio in 1940 at age 14. Later, she became the first female member of the royal family to join the armed forces in full-time, active-duty service.

Public Service

Elizabeth ascended to the throne after her father’s death in 1952 and was crowned on June 2, 1953.

The role of the sovereign is largely ceremonial in today’s Britain. Thus, when she acceded to the throne, many in the public questioned the relevance of the British monarchy — criticisms that persisted throughout the queen’s reign.

However the queen expressed the belief — which she demonstrated with actions throughout her lifetime — that some traditions are worth saving. Using television to deliver her first Christmas broadcast in 1957, the queen emphasized that her role as sovereign would be one of public service.  

“In the old days, the monarch led his soldiers on the battlefield and his leadership at all times was close and personal. Today things are very different. I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice. But I can do something else. I can give you my heart, and my devotion to these old islands, and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”

Referring to herself as a “representative” of her people, the queen was known for her great skill at diplomacy and strengthened ties between the United Kingdom and other nations over many decades. On May 16, 1991, she became the first British monarch to address the U.S. Congress.  

She was involved with countless charities and initiatives to improve peoples’ lives. One such initiative was The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, which sponsored medical initiatives to treat eye conditions and prevent blindness in Africa, Australia and India.

Environmentally conscious, the queen planted more than 1,500 trees across the world during her lifetime and spoke alongside famed environmental advocate David Attenborough. For her Platinum Jubilee, she started an initiative called the Queen’s Green Canopy to encourage public involvement in planting trees. So far, thousands of trees have been planted in the United Kingdom as a result.  

The queen, a deeply religious woman, served as the head of the Church of England and was also commander-in-chief of Britain’s armed forces. In her younger years, she became an iconic sight riding proudly in uniform at the trooping of the color on her favorite horse, Burmese .  

Although her death truly marks the end of an era, the queen left behind a lasting legacy that will ensure that she holds a high place in history for many years to come.

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Guest Essay

Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire

By Maya Jasanoff

Ms. Jasanoff, a professor of history at Harvard, is the author of three books about the British Empire and its subjects.

“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April and an official one in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted.

The queen embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties — her final public act was to appoint her 15th prime minister — and for her unflagging performance of them, she will be rightly mourned. She has been a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world. But we should not romanticize her era. For the queen was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence. By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.

Elizabeth became queen of a postwar Britain where sugar was still rationed and rubble from bomb damage still being cleared away. Journalists and commentators promptly cast the 25-year-old as a phoenix rising into a new Elizabethan age. An inevitable analogy, perhaps, and a pointed one. The first Elizabethan Age, in the second half of the 16th century, marked England’s emergence from a second-tier European state to an ambitious overseas power. Elizabeth I expanded the navy, encouraged privateering and granted charters to trading companies that laid the foundations for a transcontinental empire.

Elizabeth II grew up in a royal family whose significance in the British Empire had swollen even as its political authority shrank at home. The monarchy ruled an ever-lengthening list of Crown colonies, including Hong Kong (1842), India (1858) and Jamaica (1866). Queen Victoria, proclaimed empress of India in 1876, presided over flamboyant celebrations of imperial patriotism; her birthday was enshrined from 1902 as Empire Day. Members of the royal family made lavish ceremonial tours of the colonies, bestowing upon Indigenous Asian and African rulers an alphabet soup of orders and decorations.

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday on a royal tour in South Africa, delivering a much-quoted speech in which she promised that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” She was on another royal tour, in Kenya, when she learned of her father’s death.

On Coronation Day in 1953, The Times of London proudly broke the news of the first successful summiting of Mount Everest by the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and the New Zealander Edmund Hillary, calling it a “happy and vigorous augury for another Elizabethan era.” The imperialistic tenor of the news notwithstanding, Queen Elizabeth II would never be an empress in name — the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 stripped away that title — but she inherited and sustained an imperial monarchy by assuming the title of head of the Commonwealth.

“The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past,” she insisted in her Christmas Day message of 1953. Its history suggested otherwise. Initially imagined as a consortium of the “white” settler colonies ( championed by the South African prime minister Jan Smuts ), the Commonwealth had its origins in a racist and paternalistic conception of British rule as a form of tutelage, educating colonies in the mature responsibilities of self-government. Reconfigured in 1949 to accommodate newly independent Asian republics, the Commonwealth was the empire’s sequel, and a vehicle for preserving Britain’s international influence.

In photographs from Commonwealth leaders’ conferences, the white queen sits front and center among dozens of mostly nonwhite premiers, like a matriarch flanked by her offspring. She took her role very seriously, sometimes even clashing with her ministers to support Commonwealth interests over narrower political imperatives, as when she advocated multifaith Commonwealth Day services in the 1960s and encouraged a tougher line on apartheid South Africa.

What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in 1979.

We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story, either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies, “ might embarrass Her Majesty’s government ” and deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011 . Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.

And there were always more royal tours for the press to cover. Nearly every year until the 2000s, the queen toured Commonwealth nations — a good bet for cheering crowds and flattering footage , her miles clocked and countries visited totted up as if they’d been heroically attained on foot rather than by royal yacht and Rolls-Royce: 44,000 miles and 13 territories to mark her coronation; 56,000 miles and 14 countries for the Silver Jubilee in 1977; an additional 40,000 miles traversing Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand and Canada for the Gold. The British Empire largely decolonized, but the monarchy did not.

During the last decades of her reign, the queen watched Britain — and the royal family — struggle to come to terms with its postimperial position. Tony Blair championed multiculturalism and brought devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but he also revived Victorian imperial rhetoric in joining the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Social and regional inequality widened, and London became a haven for superrich oligarchs. Though the queen’s personal popularity rebounded from its low point after the death of Princess Diana, the royal family split over Harry and Meghan’s accusations of racism. In 1997 the queen famously shed a tear when the taxpayer-funded Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned, a few months after escorting the last British governor from Hong Kong. Boris Johnson floated the idea of building a new one .

In recent years, public pressure has been building on the British state and institutions to acknowledge and make amends for the legacies of empire, slavery and colonial violence. In 2013, in response to a lawsuit brought by victims of torture in colonial Kenya, the British government agreed to pay nearly 20 million pounds in damages to survivors; another payout was made in 2019 to survivors in Cyprus. Efforts are underway to reform school curriculums, to remove public monuments that glorify empire and to alter the presentation of historic sites linked to imperialism.

Yet xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right) as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with Liz Truss, now the prime minister, as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of “Global Britain” steeped in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.

The queen’s very longevity made it easier for outdated fantasies of a second Elizabethan age to persist. She represented a living link to World War II and a patriotic myth that Britain alone saved the world from fascism. She had a personal relationship with Winston Churchill, the first of her 15 prime ministers, whom Mr. Johnson pugnaciously defended against well-founded criticism of his retrograde imperialism. And she was, of course, a white face on all the coins, notes and stamps circulated in a rapidly diversifying nation: From perhaps one person of color in 200 Britons at her accession, the 2011 census counted one in seven .

Now that she is gone, the imperial monarchy must end too. It’s well past time, for instance, to act on calls to rename the Order of the British Empire, a distinction that the queen has bestowed on hundreds of Britons every year for community service and contributions to public life. The queen served as head of state in more than a dozen Commonwealth realms, more of which may now follow the example of Barbados, which decided “to fully leave our colonial past behind” and become a republic in 2021. The queen’s death could also aid a fresh campaign for Scottish independence, which she was understood to oppose . Though Commonwealth leaders decided in 2018 to fulfill the queen’s “sincere wish” and recognize Prince Charles as the next head of the Commonwealth, the organization emphasizes that the role is not hereditary .

Those who heralded a second Elizabethan age hoped Elizabeth II would sustain British greatness; instead, it was the era of the empire’s implosion. She will be remembered for her tireless dedication to her job, whose future she attempted to secure by stripping the disgraced Prince Andrew of his roles and resolving the question of Queen Camilla’s title. Yet it was a position so closely linked to the British Empire that even as the world transformed around her, myths of imperial benevolence persisted. The new king now has an opportunity to make a real historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s monarchy to be more like those of Scandinavia. That would be an end to celebrate.

Maya Jasanoff, a professor of history at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.”

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The Queen of the World

The paradox of Elizabeth II’s reign was that in presiding over a shrinking empire, she became a modern global monarch.

Q ueen Elizabeth II’s longevity alone places her in the pantheon of royal greats. At the time of her death, at Balmoral Castle today, she had served 70 years as Queen—the longest of any sovereign in the English monarchy’s 1,000-year history. But it is not simply her longevity that marks her for greatness, but her ability to stay relevant as the world changed around her.

She was the product of ancestral inheritance but was more popular than any of her prime ministers and remained head of state in countries around the world because of public support. She was in a sense a democratic Queen, a progressive conservative, an aristocratic multiculturalist.

Queen Elizabeth was a constitutional monarch, not a political leader with real powers, and one who was required to serve an ever-changing set of realms, peoples, institutions, and ideas that were no longer as obviously compatible as they had been when she ascended to the throne. The Queen’s great achievement was to honor the commitment she made to an imperial nation and its empire as a princess even as it became a multiethnic state and a Commonwealth.

When the Queen devoted her whole life to the service of Britain’s “great imperial family,” she meant it and honored it. And she did so in a way that brought more harmony than discord. Even as her nation’s influence shrank, the world embraced her.

1. The Globa l Introduction

In October 1940, a teenage Princess Elizabeth gave the first of what would be a lifetime of public speeches designed to move, embolden, and steady the nerves of an imperiled empire. At the time, the British empire was standing alone against Nazi Germany: France had been crushed, the Soviet Union had made a deal with Hitler, and the United States remained aloof from World War II. Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, had traveled with their parents to record a message for the BBC that would be broadcast to “the children of the empire,” as well as children in the U.S.

The recording offers a glimpse of a time and place that is gone, as well as the first look at this representative of a new age, the age of Elizabeth. Hers would be an age not of world war and European empires, but of imperial retreat and American expansion; of the Cold War and the apparent end of history; of nationalism and globalization; of the space race and the internet.

For the 14-year-old princess, none of this was visible that day in 1940. The world that existed then faced the prospect of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Ostensibly, her message was to the children evacuated to the British countryside and to the Greater Britain that then existed beyond the seas, to evade German aerial bombardment of cities. In her clipped but childish tones, the young Elizabeth marvels at the lives being led in these far-flung corners of the world. “All the new sights you must be seeing, and the adventures you must be having,” she says , as if reading an exciting bedtime story. But then she turns to the central thrust of the message: a plea. “I am sure that you, too, are often thinking of the Old Country. I know you won’t forget us.”

Read: How The Crown , and its clothes, transform power

Here was the vulnerability at the core of Princess Elizabeth’s address. The Old Country was in trouble and needed help. Princess Elizabeth had been enlisted to ask for it, to do her duty—a task she would perform for decades to come.

During her reign, she weathered an array of crises, from her clashes with Margaret Thatcher to her mishandling of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In doing so, she became the focus of something akin to a secular religion, the royalist historian David Starkey has noted, a form of “ British Shintoism ,” according to others such as Philip Murphy, a professor of British and Commonwealth history at the University of London.

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born on April 21, 1926, as a princess to not simply a king but an emperor. She became Queen to a multitude of realms. A child of empire, European supremacy, and the old order—even the old faith, Anglican Christianity—she came to see it as her solemn duty to represent all the peoples and religions of the Commonwealth.

This duty created friction during her reign, but it made her different from any other European monarch and, paradoxically, kept her modern. A great irony of Queen Elizabeth II is that the most penetrating criticism of her reign came not from the republican left but from the nationalist right, parts of which saw past her image of continuity and tradition to the deep change that her rule actually represented.

On Princess Elizabeth’s 21st birthday, she delivered a radio broadcast that would define her life. Addressing all “the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire,” and specifically “the youth of the British family of nations,” she asked for their permission to speak as their representative. Delivered from Cape Town, South Africa, this was not a message to England, or Britain, or even the United Kingdom, but to the already fading empire.

The message was designed to inspire, but also to begin a transition. The princess declared that just as England had saved Europe from Napoleonic domination in the 19th century, the British empire had saved the world from Hitler in the 20th. The task now before the empire was just as pressing, she said: It needed to save itself.

“If we all go forward together with an unwavering faith, a high courage, and a quiet heart,” Elizabeth said, “we shall be able to make of this ancient commonwealth, which we all love so dearly, an even grander thing.” In doing so, the princess, with a politician’s sleight of hand, had endowed a relatively new construct, the British Commonwealth, with the myth of ancient roots. “I declare before you all,” she continued, “that my whole life whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

In 1947, such a commitment could still be made without embarrassment. Formally, India, the jewel in the British imperial crown, was not yet independent, though the legal process was under way and would become reality within months. The last vestiges of royal connection to Ireland had similarly not yet been cut. Soon, however, this apparently “ancient” family would undergo a revolution.

Read: The first Brexit was theological

In the early hours of February 6, 1952, King George VI, Elizabeth’s father, died in his sleep. She was in Kenya when she learned that she had become Queen. Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast the news, describing the Crown as “the magic link, which unites our loosely bound but strongly interwoven commonwealth of nations.” And yet, just five years after Elizabeth’s Cape Town address, the world had already changed to such an extent that to speak of a great imperial family, as Elizabeth had done, was no longer appropriate. By 1952, for example, India was not only independent, but a republic. This new Commonwealth comprised free and equal countries that voluntarily accepted Elizabeth as their symbolic head—a role with no real power for an organization with no real status.

She was Queen, then, but of what?

Her father had been crowned George VI of “Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas,” as well as “Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.” By the time the young Elizabeth was crowned, the title “Emperor of India” was obsolete. Yet even this did not go far enough. She was proclaimed Queen Elizabeth II, “Queen of this Realm and of all Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”

Although few paid much attention to the changes at the time, the new terminology caught the eye of one of the most influential and controversial British politicians of the postwar era, Enoch Powell. He had spotted that the new declaration contained within it imperial retreat and was dismayed. But this was not the real source of his fury—it was that Britain had been subsumed into a multinational structure that it no longer led. In Britain, Elizabeth would be “Queen of the United Kingdom,” but elsewhere she would have different titles, granted by different countries: Queen of Australia in Australia, Queen of Canada in Canada, and so forth.

What Powell had seen was that this marked a sea change not only for the Queen, but for Britain itself. What had been a single empire with a single sovereign was no longer—nor was it even a British Commonwealth. In its place was simply a Commonwealth with different peoples, each equal to the others, including that of the Old Country, whether or not they took the Queen as their monarch.

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth had declared that she would give her whole life to the service of Britain’s great imperial family. When she became Queen, it was no longer clear what that really meant.

3. The Revolution

The change to the Queen’s title was, in fact, just another logical step down a road already taken. In 1948, Parliament had passed legislation revolutionizing the nature of British nationality itself, creating several separate citizenships within the empire. What had been a Greater Britain around the world, singular and indivisible, loyal to the King and empire, was no more. It had shrunk, leaving space for Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand nationalisms to flourish as separate identities, just as a Scotsman today can also be British.

The Queen’s title, therefore, was a sign of the coming age, a beacon in the fog of the 1950s lighting the way to the postimperial world that exists today.

For the ordinary Brit at home, glued to the television to watch the Queen’s coronation, much of this passed unnoticed. As Vernon Bogdanor writes in The Monarchy and the Constitution , the feelings of attachment to Britain in its former dominions, such as New Zealand and Canada, were taken for granted. In 1953, Australia’s prime minister, R. G. Menzies, spoke of the Queen passing on “a crown that will always be the sign and proof that, wherever we may be in the world, we are one people.” Menzies had in 1948 even said that “the boundaries of Britain do not lie on the Kentish Coast, they are to be found at Cape York and Invercargill.”

From the December 1943 issue: The education of a queen

Indeed, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, there seemed little reason to doubt the strength of this great global nation. The day before, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary had conquered Mount Everest with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, planting the Union Jack on its peak. Welcoming the news, New Zealand’s prime minister declared how proud he was that an Englishman had been the first to climb the world’s highest mountain. During the Queen’s first royal tour of the Commonwealth, in 1953–54, she visited 13 countries, including Bermuda, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Australia, and New Zealand, covering more than 40,000 miles in six months. In Australia, 6–7 million people turned out to see her, amounting to about 75 percent of the country’s population.

Only now is it possible to see the slow unwinding of this Greater British identity during the age of Elizabeth. An early glimpse came during her first visit to India and Pakistan as Queen, in 1961. Despite being head of the Commonwealth, of which India was a member, the Queen was invited only in her capacity as Queen of the United Kingdom. To do otherwise might have implied “the existence in some degree of authority residing in Her Majesty over the Republic of India,” Philip Murphy points out in Monarchy and the End of Empire . When the Commonwealth bumped up against the hard reality of Britain’s place in the postimperial world, there was no question that the Commonwealth had to stand aside.

It was scarcely appreciated then, but the Queen’s coronation—that great triumph of Britishness at the peak of its powers—was what signified the retreat. A moment of deep continuity for the Old Country was actually a moment of quiet revolution, turning Britain inward and setting a course that it would travel for the rest of her reign, culminating in a threat to the very future of Britain by the time of her death, with support for secession growing in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Britons did not know it at the time of her ascent, but they were once again an island people. Only their Queen was global.

4. The Reign

In retrospect, it was absurd to think that the Queen could be both British and global, sharing herself equally among her various realms. How can one person be Queen of the United Kingdom one moment and Queen of Australia the next, as well as head of a Commonwealth? In time, the practical reality revealed itself—the Queen was primarily Queen of the United Kingdom.

From 1952 to her death, she would meet 13 of the 14 U.S. presidents elected in that time (Lyndon B. Johnson being the exception). She did so as Britain’s head of state—in effect, Queen of the Old Country hiding in imperial clothes, representing a state that, in U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s infamous put-down , had lost an empire but not yet found a role.

Read: The Queen Mother’s odd letters

Through the 1960s and early ’70s, following Britain’s humiliation at Suez , the country sought to tilt away from the empire toward its special relationship with the United States and membership in the new European Community. Globally, this shift in priorities meant sacrificing imperial power for imagined influence over the new empire that had replaced Britain: the United States. In Europe, it meant sacrificing trade with the Commonwealth for markets on its doorstep. For many in Britain, this was a hard choice, given support for the old imperial connections, particularly to the Greater British dominions (or, more cynically, to the white Commonwealth) of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Yet successive British governments knew which direction they wanted to go in. In Africa, for example, Britain, unlike France, encouraged its former colonies not only to become independent, but to become republics . The loss of the empire was seen as a price worth paying for greater influence, and the Queen supported recognition of African nationalism. In 1960, when British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan remarked in a speech from South Africa that the “wind of change is blowing through this continent,” signaling the inevitability of decolonization, Elizabeth “took the unusual step of indicating her personal approval of Macmillan’s words,” Murphy records. Shortly after the speech, Macmillan received a telegram with a message from London that “the Queen was very interested and much impressed by the Prime Minister’s speech.” Four years later, the process of decolonization in East, West, and Central Africa was largely complete.

However, tensions between her role as global Queen and national Queen were inevitable—and duly came. Because the Queen was atop neither an empire nor an international body with a constitution like, say, the European Union, her title as head of the Commonwealth was unclear, unwritten, and, crucially, unlinked to her position as head of state in Britain or anywhere else. What happened if her two roles clashed?

In 1952, when the British dominions were part of an imagined Greater Britain or—outside the Indian subcontinent—the subjects of a still-vast empire, there was little scope for such a clash. By the 1960s, as the empire continued to be swept away, there was a very real prospect of friction.

The danger, as Powell had pointed out, was that in creating the fiction of the Commonwealth, the Queen risked losing the support of her people at home by appearing to have split loyalties. As the 1960s turned into the ’70s and ’80s, this prophecy seemed to be coming true. In an article in 1964, Powell spoke of the resentment of British people seeing their sovereign “playing an alien part as one of the characters in the Commonwealth charade.” The imperial monarchy, to which the Queen had devoted her life, appeared to be threatening the national monarchy.

Tensions really began to be felt when the Conservative Party in Britain elected as its leader a Powellite in the form of Margaret Thatcher, who seemed to have little time for the Commonwealth and even less sympathy for the policies of some of its more radical members. According to Murphy’s Monarchy and the End of Empire , Thatcher and her closest advisers joked that the acronym CHOGM—for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting—stood for “Compulsory Hand-Outs for Greedy Mendicants.”

In the Queen’s 1983 Christmas message, four years after Thatcher came to power, she appeared to champion the policies of India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, over those of her own government, adding that despite the progress that had been made on the subcontinent, “the greatest problem in the world today remains the gap between rich and poor countries, and we shall not begin to close this gap until we hear less about nationalism and more about interdependence.”

From the magazine: How to write about royalty

This was not a message from the Thatcherite script and its Cold War mentality. Powell said that the intervention suggested the Queen had “the interests and affairs of other countries in other continents as much, or more, at heart than those of her own people.”

Another clash between the global and national Queen came in 1986, when a number of countries were threatening to boycott the Commonwealth Games in protest of Thatcher’s opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Britain had been isolated on the issue, with the Queen notably avoiding taking Britain’s side. Sonny Ramphal, the Guyanese Commonwealth secretary-general, later recalled that “if the Queen hadn’t been there we might have gone on the rocks.”

Later that year, a series of articles began to appear in the British press revealing a rift between the Queen and her prime minister over the Commonwealth. A profile of Prince Charles in The Economist suggested that his views were considerably to the left of Thatcher’s. An article in the newspaper Today then suggested that the Queen was worried the division over sanctions could break up the Commonwealth, and had even urged Thatcher to change her views. Similar pieces appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph . Finally, The Sunday Times led its front page with the headline “Queen Dismayed by ‘Uncaring’ Thatcher,” calling her “The African Queen.”

Such revelations, which came close to constitutional-crisis territory, centered on the Queen’s split loyalties to Commonwealth and nation. Powell had warned that this split would make her look more concerned for the Commonwealth than for Britain. The Queen had become a champion of global multiculturalism at home and abroad. Almost by accident, she had become modern.

5. The Legacy

In some senses, Queen Elizabeth II leaves an ambiguous legacy. She stands above almost all of Britain’s British monarchs, but was one who oversaw a drastic shrinkage in the monarchy’s power, prestige, and influence. Such a legacy, however, does not do the Queen justice.

At the funeral of the former Israeli leader Shimon Peres in 2016, then–U.S. President Barack Obama likened him to some of the “other giants of the 20th century.” Obama, whose father was a Kenyan government official born in what was then part of the British empire, chose to name two figures: Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II.

The Queen’s role in the Commonwealth might have been a device to hide the reality of the British empire’s decline, but she did not believe so. The irony is that in doing her duty to this imperial shadow in the same way she did her duty to Britain, she was better able to symbolize a modern, multicultural Britain and the world of the 21st century than logic might suggest was possible for an aristocratic European princess. Indeed, she is more popular in many African Commonwealth countries today than the former white dominions, which may soon choose to become republics and long ago stopped seeing themselves as British.

Yet her death has given rise to a sense of unease. Her eldest son, Charles, seems an unlikely figure for the British Shintoism that built up around his mother. Whatever his merits, such has been the nature of his life, lived in the glare of the modern world—of Diana and Camilla , The Crown and the tabloids—that it looks impossible to re-create the kind of worship that attached itself to the Queen.

Read: What Meghan Markle means for the royal family

Generations have known nothing but the Queen. She became almost above reproach, an icon on a wall, a symbol. Charles, by contrast, is human and flawed and distinctly reproachable. With the Queen goes the monarchy’s protective shield. Can the next generation escape the tarnish of racism leveled by Harry and Meghan, or the scandals of Prince Andrew?

Beyond Britain, will Australia and New Zealand and Canada accept Charles as their King, as they did Elizabeth in 1952? And what of the Queen’s other great love, the Commonwealth? It has already agreed to let Charles inherit his mother’s leadership. But how long can such an institution really survive? In an era of Black Lives Matter and imperial guilt, can an African child once again be pictured kneeling before some distant European monarch, as happened for the Queen’s diamond jubilee, in 2012?

None of these questions is answerable for now. Much rests on Charles himself. Can he show the lifelong restraint of his mother, the dignity and duty, the reserve and careful calculation? Will events blow him off course?

When King George VI died, Winston Churchill paid tribute to him in the House of Commons, before turning to his new Queen. “So far I have spoken of the past, but with the new reign we must all feel our contact with the future,” the prime minister said. “She comes to the throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” For Churchill, such a golden age was possible only with “a true and lasting peace.” He then concluded: “Let us hope and pray that the accession to our ancient throne of Queen Elizabeth II may be the signal for such a brightening salvation of the human scene.”

Looking back on her reign, it is clear that the age of Elizabeth really was golden: an age of extraordinary prosperity, European peace, human rights, and the collapse of Soviet tyranny. Queen Elizabeth II— the Queen—was one of the great symbols of that age, though not a creator of it, a servant rather than a master. But if her legacy is anything, it is that symbols and service matter, even as what they symbolize and serve bend and bow to meet the new reality.

Be informed. Be challenged. Be inspired.

Essay: Queen Elizabeth II – a moderniser who steered the British monarchy into the 21st century

• SEAN LANG David Adams
• September 9, 2022
• No Comments

UK academic SEAN LANG reflects – in an article first published on The Conversation – on the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II… 

When the late historian Sir Ben Pimlott embarked on his 1996 biography , his colleagues expressed surprise that he should consider Queen Elizabeth II worthy of serious study at all. Yet Pimlott’s judgement proved sound and, if few academics have followed his lead, the political role of the monarchy has received thoughtful treatment in the creative arts.

Stephen Frears’s 2006 film, The Queen , showed her dilemma after the death of Princess Diana; Peter Morgan’s stage play The Audience showed the monarch’s weekly meetings with her prime ministers. And she has been shown in a generally positive and sympathetic light by both Netflix’s acclaimed drama series The Crown and even in Mike Bartlett’s speculative play King Charles III , about the difficulty her heir would have in filling her shoes.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II reacts as she attends a reception in the Ballroom of Sandringham House which is the Queen’s Norfolk residence, with representatives from local community groups to celebrate the start of the Platinum Jubilee, in Sandringham, Britain, on 5th February. PICTURE: Joe Giddens/ Pool via Reuters.

Elizabeth’s reign was a delayed result of the abdication crisis of 1936, the defining royal event of the 20th century. Edward VIII’s unexpected abdication thrust his shy, stammering younger brother Albert onto the throne as King George VI. Shortly thereafter he was thrust into the role of figurehead for the nation through the second world war.

The war was the most important formative experience for his elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth. Her experience as a car mechanic with the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service – the women’s army service) meant that she could legitimately claim to have participated in what has been called “the people’s war”.

“Elizabeth II inherited a monarchy whose political power had been steadily ebbing away since the 18th century but whose role in the public life of the nation seemed, if anything, to have grown ever more important. Monarchs in the 20th century were expected both to perform ceremonial duties with appropriate gravity and to lighten up enough to share and enjoy the tastes and interests of ordinary people.”

The experience gave her a more naturally common touch than any of her predecessors had displayed. When, in 1947, she married Philip Mountbatten – who became Duke of Edinburgh (and died in April, 2021, at the age of 99) – her wedding was seized on as an opportunity to brighten a national life still in the grip of post-war austerity and rationing.

Elizabeth II inherited a monarchy whose political power had been steadily ebbing away since the 18th century but whose role in the public life of the nation seemed, if anything, to have grown ever more important. Monarchs in the 20th century were expected both to perform ceremonial duties with appropriate gravity and to lighten up enough to share and enjoy the tastes and interests of ordinary people.

The Queen’s elaborate coronation in 1953 achieved a balance of both these roles. The ancient ceremony could be traced to the monarchy’s Saxon origins, while her decision to allow it to be televised brought it into the living rooms of ordinary people with the latest modern technology. Royal ceremonial was henceforth to be democratically visible, ironically becoming much better choreographed and more formal than it had ever been before.

The Queen went on to revolutionise public perceptions of the monarchy when, at the urging of Lord Mountbatten and his son-in-law, the television producer Lord Brabourne, she consented to the 1969 BBC film Royal Family. It was a remarkably intimate portrayal of her home life, showing her at breakfast, having a barbecue at Balmoral and popping down to the local shops.

Prince Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales the same year, another royal television event, was followed in 1970 by the Queen’s decision during a visit to Australia and New Zealand to break with protocol and mix directly with the crowds who had come out to see her. These “walkabouts” soon became a central part of any royal visit.

The highpoint of the Queen’s mid-reign popularity came with the 1977 Silver Jubilee celebrations, which saw the country festooned in red, white and blue at VE Day-style street parties. It was followed in 1981 by the enormous popularity of the wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.

Testing times The following decades proved much more testing. Controversy in the early 1990s about the Queen’s exemption from income tax forced the Crown to change its financial arrangements so it paid like everyone else. Gossip and scandal surrounding the younger royals turned into divorces for Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and – most damagingly of all – Prince Charles. The Queen referred to 1992 – the height of the scandals – as her “ annus horribilis ”.

The revelations about the misery Princess Diana had endured in her marriage presented the public with a much harder, less sympathetic image of the royal family, which seemed vindicated when the Queen uncharacteristically miscalculated the public mood after Diana’s death in 1997. Her instinct was to follow protocol and precedent, staying at Balmoral and keeping her grandchildren with her.

This seemed hard and uncaring to a public hungry for open displays of emotion that would have been unthinkable in the Queen’s younger days. “Where is our Queen?” demanded The Sun , while the Daily Express called on her to “Show us you care!” insisting that she break with protocol and fly the Union Jack at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Never since the abdication had the popularity of the monarchy sunk so low.

Caught briefly on the back foot by this remarkable change in British public behaviour, the Queen soon regained the initiative, addressing the nation on television and bowing her head to Diana’s funeral cortege during a cleverly conceived and choreographed televised service.

The extent to which she quickly regained public support was shown by the enormous, if unexpected, success of her 2002 Golden Jubilee, which was ushered in by the extraordinary sight of Brian May performing a guitar solo on the roof of Buckingham Palace. By the time London hosted the Olympics in 2012 she was sufficiently confident of her position to agree to appear in a memorable tongue-in-cheek cameo in the opening ceremony, when she appeared to parachute down into the arena from a helicopter in the company of James Bond.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth sits next to Prince Charles during the State Opening of Parliament in central London, Britain, on 21st June, 2017. PICTURE: Stefan Rousseau/Pool via Reuters/File photo.

Political sphere Queen Elizabeth kept the crown above party politics, but she was always fully engaged with the political world. A firm believer in the Commonwealth, even when her own prime ministers had long lost faith in it, as its head she mediated in disputes between member states and provided support and guidance even to Commonwealth leaders who were strongly opposed to her own UK government.

Her prime ministers often paid tribute to her political wisdom and knowledge. These were the result both of her years of experience and of her diligence in reading state papers. Harold Wilson remarked that to attend the weekly audience unprepared was like being caught at school not having done your homework. It was widely believed that she found relations with Margaret Thatcher difficult .

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh sometimes objected to the political use to which governments put them. In 1978 they were unhappy to be forced by the then foreign secretary, David Owen, to receive the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife as guests at Buckingham Palace.

The Queen could act to very positive effect in international relations, often providing the ceremonial and public affirmation of the work of her ministers. She established a good rapport with a string of American presidents, particularly Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, and her successful 2011 state visit to the Republic of Ireland, in which she astonished her hosts by addressing them in Gaelic , remains a model of the positive impact a state visit can have.

She was even able to put aside her personal feelings about the 1979 murder of Lord Mountbatten to offer a cordial welcome to the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness, when he took office in 2007 as deputy first minister of Northern Ireland.

Only very occasionally and briefly did the Queen allow her own political views to surface. On a visit to the London Stock Exchange after the 2008 financial crash she asked sharply why nobody had seen it coming.

In 2014, her carefully worded appeal to Scots to think carefully about their vote in the Independence Referendum was widely – and clearly rightly – interpreted as an intervention on behalf of the Union. And in the run-up to the 2021 UN COP26 conference in Glasgow, from which she had to pull out on medical advice , she was overheard expressing irritation at the lack of political action on the climate change emergency.

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Final years As she approached her tenth decade, she finally began to slow down, delegating more of her official duties to other members of the royal family – even the annual laying of her wreath at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, while in May 2022 she delegated her most important ceremonial duty, the reading of the Speech from the Throne at the State Opening of Parliament, to Prince Charles.

She retained her ability to rise to a crisis, however. In 2020, as the COVID pandemic descended, the Queen, in sharp contrast to her prime minister, addressed the nation from lockdown at Windsor in a calm, well-judged message. Her short address combined solidarity with her people with the reassurance that, in a conscious reference to Vera Lynn’s wartime hit, “We will meet again.”

The decade also brought sadness. Her grandson, Prince Harry, and his wife Meghan Markle withdrew completely from royal duties, causing deep hurt to the royal family. This hurt was compounded when the Sussexes accused the royal family, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey which was watched around the world, of treating them with cruelty, disdain and even racism.

The shock of the interview was followed quickly by the death of Prince Philip , her husband of 73 years, a few months short of his 100th birthday. At his funeral, which was reduced in scale to meet the requirements of COVID regulations, the Queen cut an unusually lonely figure, small, masked and sitting alone. As her health declined in the months following his death, the deep impact of his loss became all too apparent.

The pain of the Sussexes’ estrangement from the royal family was heavily compounded by the disgrace soon afterwards of Prince Andrew, her second and, it was often suggested, her favourite son. His close involvement with the convicted American paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, led to the unedifying spectacle of a senior member of the royal family being accused in an American court of underage sex; he made his own position immeasurably worse by agreeing to a disastrous interview on the BBC current affairs programme Newsnight .

The Queen responded to the scandal with remarkable decisiveness: she stripped her son of all his royal and military titles, including the cherished “HRH”, and reduced him, in effect, to the status of a private citizen. Even her closest family were not to be allowed to undermine all she had done to protect and preserve the monarchy.

The remarkable success of her 2022 Platinum Jubilee was a sign of just how much she had retained the affections of her people; a particularly well-received highlight was a charming cameo performance showing her having tea with the children’s television character, Paddington Bear.

Apart from in dreams, in which she was often popularly supposed to appear , the Queen’s most regular contact with her subjects was in her annual Christmas message on television and radio. This not only reflected her work and engagements over the previous year, but it reaffirmed, with greater frankness and clarity than many of her ministers seemed able to summon, her deeply held Christian faith.

As head of the Church of England she was herself a Christian leader and she never forgot it. The Christmas message adapted over the years to new technology, but it was unchanging in style and content, reflecting the monarchy as she shaped it.

Under Elizabeth II, the British monarchy survived by changing its outward appearance without changing its public role. Republican critics of monarchy had long given up demanding its immediate abolition and accepted that the Queen’s personal popularity rendered their aim impracticable while she was still alive.

Elizabeth II, whose 70-year reign makes her the longest reigning monarch in British history, leaves her successor with a sort of British monarchical republic, in which the proportions of its ingredients of mystique, ceremony, populism and openness have been constantly changed in order to keep it essentially the same. It has long been acknowledged by political leaders and commentators all over the world that the Queen handled her often difficult and delicate constitutional role with grace and remarkable, even formidable, political skill.

Sean Lang  is a senior lecturer in history at  Anglia Ruskin University . This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

• monarchy , Prime Ministers , Prince Charles , Queen Elizabeth II , UK

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What Does Queen Elizabeth II’s Death Mean for the Future of the Monarchy?

Following her funeral today, two UCF professors discuss the impact of Queen Elizabeth II’s death.

By Nicole Dudenhoefer ’17 | September 19, 2022

When Queen Elizabeth II died Sept. 8, it marked the end of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. At the time of her coronation in 1953, she ruled over seven independent countries, which grew to 32 nations during 70-year reign. At the time of her death, Queen Elizabeth II ruled over 15 countries in the Commonwealth and 14 additional overseas territories, which collectively are home to over 150 million people, according to Time .

“Although everyone knew this day was coming, it still came as a huge shock with an emptiness inside, more in common with a personal loss rather than the passing of a ruling monarch,” says Visit Orlando Endowed Chair of Tourism Marketing Alan Fyall, who was born in England and lived there more for than 40 years. “This is consistent with my own experience. Her loss is unexpectedly sad and emotional. Britain will be changed forever for many, myself included.”

Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral took place today and is estimated to have been broadcasted to 4.1 billion viewers. While a much smaller number of people traveled to England for the service, Fyall suggests there will be a larger surge in visitors over the next six to twelve months.

Although there are different views on the British monarchy, especially within regions impacted by colonialism, Elizabeth II’s death is of international significance.

“She was a link to the past: the last head of state to have served in World War II, the last monarch to have known the British Empire as it was and the only monarch most Britons knew,” says Peter Larson, chair of UCF’s Department of History and an associate professor who specializes in early modern English history. “She witnessed the beginning and end of the Cold War, which dominated the second half of the twentieth century. She tried to keep pace with all the many changes, opening Buckingham Palace to visitors and permitting royal family events to be televised. She has kept the monarchy popular and kept it going despite scandals; that there is still a British monarchy has much to do with her vision.”

Here Larson shares insight on Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the future of the monarchy.

What will Queen Elizabeth II be remembered for? In Britain, she will be remembered for her calm and dignity; she was someone all Britons could look up to, and she could be a unifying figure. She also brought the monarchy into the public eye much more. Hers was the first televised coronation and will be the first televised funeral of a monarch. Every year on Christmas Day, she gave a televised address. And we have seen much of the lives of her children and grandchildren. She also had a sense of humor, as when she had tea with Paddington Bear.

For the rest of the world, it truly varies. In the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, many will see in her as a symbol of a shared Anglophone heritage, and as a dignified ruler. But others cannot help but associate her with the British Empire and colonization, which took a huge toll in lives and wealth on many countries, such as Jamaica, India or Nigeria. For us in the U.S., it’s been more than 200 years since we rebelled against “taxation without representation” but for many people elsewhere in the world, gaining independence is still in living memory and they will know of friends or relatives who suffered under colonial rule. So they may respect her as a person, but see in all the ceremony the empire that oppressed them.

Her reign represents both tradition and change, and that can be seen in the debate over whether she was a feminist icon. Certainly she was very traditional, and she did not embrace feminism in many ways; yet her life was a model for many women. She could have let Prince Philip do more (even let him be king consort) but did not. She was a female head of state when the ideal for women was still to be a housewife and mother. She was a working mother, with her children often at home while she was on business trips.

What did her state funeral entail? It started with a short procession from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey. The queen’s coffin was placed on the gun carriage again but this time is pulled by Royal Navy sailors, not horses. The path was lined by Royal Marines and Royal Navy personnel, with the procession led by a combined, interservice Pipes & Drum corps of over 200 musicians.

Much of the funeral service itself was familiar (especially to those from the Anglican or Roman Catholic traditions); it’s just that you see the Archbishop of Canterbury gave the sermon, princes and government ministers read passages from the Bible or gave personal recollections, and heads of state and VIPs were in the audience. There has not been a state funeral since 1965 (Winston Churchill). The service was “high church” so the clergy were in full regalia, and there were candles, incense, and choirs. At the end of the service was a nation-wide two minutes of silence, followed by the Queen’s Piper playing the national anthem (“God Save the King”) and some military calls.

Then the queen’s coffin was taken from the Abbey to Wellington Arch, on a horse-drawn carriage, and then driven to Windsor Castle for a committal ceremony in St. George’s Chapel (the church of the Order of the Garter). This was also televised but was much smaller.  The Crown Jeweller — one of three people allowed to touch the crown — removed the crown, orb, and scepter, and then the queen’s coffin was lowered into the Royal Vault during the ceremony. There was a final, private burial ceremony later in the day when she was buried in the George VI Memorial Chapel, built and named in honor of her father. Her father, mother and sister are already buried there. Prince Philip’s coffin will be moved from its temporary resting place to be buried beside her.

At this time, many people are saying, “The queen is dead, long live the king.” What is the origin of the phrase? The phrase dates back at least to the 1400s, in French ( le roi est mort, vive le roi! ), and said to announce the death of the monarch. The underlying concept — that there is always a monarch — goes back in England to at least to 1272. When King Henry III died, his son and heir Prince Edward was away on Crusade, so the Royal Council proclaimed that the throne would never be empty. The U.S. has a similar custom for the president; if the president dies or resigns, the vice president automatically becomes president.

What will this new era in Britain’s history likely look like? It is hard to say now. With Brexit and a new prime minister there could be considerable changes in British society; the question is whether King Charles III would be associated with these changes, or would he try to be apolitical like his mother and serve as a symbol of continuity and perseverance?

Age is another factor; Charles III is 73. He could give Prince William and Princess Catherine a greater role than he himself had as Prince of Wales.

What does it mean to be a monarch in the current day? [In England], the monarch symbolizes the kingdom as head of state and commander in chief of the British military. Much of the role is ceremonial, such as opening Parliament and granting the Royal Assent to legislation, as well as many appearances in Britain and abroad. Queen Elizabeth did this very well, on state trips, TV appearances and appearing at events.

The monarch appoints the prime minister (chosen by the ruling party) and can advise ministers and Parliament as they draft laws. Usually this is behind closed doors and the exact role of the monarch isn’t clear.

The monarch has influence in other ways. They can bestow honors such as knighthoods (no longer limited to the military — we have Sir Elton John, for instance). They and other members of the royal family hold numerous ceremonial posts, whether as chancellor of a university, colonel-in-chief of a military regiment, or as a sponsor of a group or society. They can also give a warrant to a person or company allowing them to use the royal arms or to say “by appointment to his majesty” on their products.

The king and other family members have extensive estates, which they can do with mostly as they please. As prince, Charles created an organic brand of food and other products sold throughout the country.

In your opinion, what is one of the most interesting aspects of the Queen Elizabeth II’s passing? Something I find fascinating is how unexpectedly hard her death hit the British people. Everyone knew this was coming. She was 96, her husband died last year, and she was in declining health. But it’s been like a shockwave as people try to come to terms with it, and you can see how much the British loved and respected the queen in the outpouring of emotion, and the massive lines to walk past the queen’s coffin.

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From the Editor

September 13, 2022, how narratives defined a queen and a queen changed a narrative, the life and death of britain's queen elizabeth ii can be seen through disdain for monarchy or as an insightful view of history.

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A photograph of young Queen Elizabeth II left at the gates of Buckingham Palace, Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

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Elizabeth II Essay, Speech, Biography, Family, Reign, & Facts

Unfortunately, RIP Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth II Died at age of 96 on September 8, 2022

Elizabeth II is the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms . She is also Queen of Canada and Head of the Commonwealth. Elizabeth II has been Queen since 1952, making her the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-serving queen regnant in world history.

Essay on Queen Elizabeth II: Early Life and Family

Elizabeth II was born at 02:40 on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, the Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Elizabeth’s only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford.

During World War II, the two princesses stayed at Windsor Castle with their parents and sisters. They regularly undertook war work visits and toured bombed areas to boost morale. In 1947, Princess Elizabeth served as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her cousin Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark to Prince George, Duke of Kent. The following year, she celebrated her 21st birthday with a radio broadcast Address to the Nation where she dedicated herself to serving the Commonwealth for “my entire life”.

Elizabeth II: Education and Early Reign

Elizabeth II was born on April 21, 1926, in London, England . She was the first child of Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), and his wife, Elizabeth. As a child, she took part in family holidays and visits with her parents and grandparents. After the abdication of her uncle King Edward VIII in 1936 and her father’s accession to the throne as King George VI, she became heir presumptive to the British throne.

She began her education at home under the guidance of her governess Marion Crawford. In 1930, she started school at Willesden County School for Girls in London. In 1934 she transferred to Tenby School in Wales before returning to London in 1936 to attend Westminster School as a day girl. From 1941 to 1945 she attended boarding school at Windsor Castle while World War II raged on throughout Europe. In 1945 she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service as a sub-lieutenant and was stationed at HMS Collingwood in Gosport, Hampshire, where she worked as a mechanic and decoder.

In 1947 Elizabeth’s engagement to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten was announced. Philip had renounced his Greek and Danish royal titles when he became a naturalized British subject eight years earlier; he was also related to several European royals, including Elizabeth through his great-grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg. The couple married on November 20, 1947, at Westminster Abbey; they would go on to have four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward.

Queen Elizabeth II: Later Reign and Legacy

Elizabeth II acceded to the throne on 6 February 1952, the day after her father’s death, becoming queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth realms—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon—with a combined population of around 90 million people. In 1957, she became the first sovereign of Commonwealth realms to take up residence in a Realm other than the United Kingdom; in 1974 she moved permanently to Buckingham Palace in London.

As Head of State of each realm since 1952 (except for Ceylon and Pakistan), she holds numerous key roles: she is Supreme Governor of the Church of England; Patroness of over 800 organisations; Colonel-in-Chief or Commodore-in-Chief (often both) of their British and Commonwealth armies, navies and air forces; and has frequently represented Britain abroad on state visits.

In 1971, she was one of only two women elected as an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the first woman elected as an honorary fellow of the Royal Society (in 1945), and in 2015 she became one a small number of female members (later increased to eight) admitted as an honorary member to Trinity College Cambridge. Elizabeth is currently the world’s oldest reigning monarch as well as Britain’s longest-lived.

On 9 September 2015, Elizabeth became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch after surpassing the record set by her great-great-grandmother Victoria 64 years earlier. On 6 February 2017 she again became Queen regnant after surviving longer than any other British monarch in history—a reign lasting for 65 years and seven months (2 days short of 66 years). She is also currently world’s oldest reigning sovereign as well as Britain’s longest-ever lived monarch.

Elizabeth II: Personal Life

Elizabeth was born in London as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and she was educated privately at home. She married Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1947, with whom she has four children: Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward. Elizabeth has been widowed twice: her husband Prince Philip died in 2021, and her sister Princess Margaret died in 2002. In 2021, Elizabeth became the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum jubilee, having acceded to the throne in 1952.

Queen Elizabeth Essay: Relations with Other Royal Families

Elizabeth II visited royal families across the world throughout her reign, including those of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Spain, and Japan. She has also paid state visits to the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. In 2019, she became the first British monarch to ever visit Cuba.

During her visits, Elizabeth II often exchanged gifts with the royals she met. In 2018, she gifted King Harald V of Norway and Queen Sonja of Norway a watercolour painting by Jody Aziz of Buckingham Palace. In return, they gifted her an aubergine-coloured silk scarf from Norwegian designer Hedvig Mosaic.

Elizabeth II: travels

Elizabeth II has undertaken many official and state visits throughout her reign. In 1953, she became the first reigning monarch to travel by plane when she went to Kenya. Later that year, she embarked on her first Commonwealth tour, visiting 13 countries. During her Silver Jubilee in 1977, Elizabeth travelled more than any other previous monarch, undertaking 97 visits to 129 cities in 36 counties. In 1986, to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, Elizabeth became the first monarch ever to travel in a royal yacht on a visit to Canada.

Elizabeth II: Health

In recent years, the health of Elizabeth II has been the subject of much speculation. In 2016, she missed a church service because she was feeling “under the weather.” In 2017, she missed another church service due to a cold. In 2018, she missed several engagements due to knee pain. And in 2019, she skipped a Christmas Day service because she was still recuperating from a heavy cold.

Although the queen is now in her nineties and her health is not what it once was, she remains active and engaged. In 2019, she carried out more than 300 engagements, including hosting state visits and meeting with world leaders. She also undertook an eight-day trip to Cyprus, Bahrain, and Qatar.

Elizabeth II: Fashion

Elizabeth II is not only the longest-reigning monarch in British history but also one of the most fashion-forward. From her early days as a young princess to her more recent years as a fashionable grandmother, she has always been ahead of the trends. Here are some of the most iconic fashion moments from Elizabeth II’s life.

• The wedding dress: Elizabeth II’s wedding dress is one of the most iconic dresses of all time. Designed by Norman Hartnell, it was made of silk and decorated with 3,000 pearls and 2,000 diamonds.
• The Coronation dress: Elizabeth II’s Coronation dress was also designed by Norman Hartnell and was made of heavy embroidered satin. The train on the dress was 9 feet long and required four pages to carry it.
• The “Munich” outfit: One of Elizabeth II’s most famous outfits is the one she wore during a state visit to Munich in 1961. The blue coat and matching hat were trimmed with feathers and accessorized with a diamond brooch.
• The “Balmoral” outfit: Another iconic Elizabeth II outfit is the one she wore while on holiday at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. The plaid skirt and jacket were designed by Hardy Amies and became known as the “Balmoral” suit.

Elizabeth II: Interests

Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning British monarch and has held numerous titles and honours during her lifetime. As a constitutional monarch, she does not take part in politics but has seen twelve prime ministers hold office during her reign. In 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip Mountbatten, a man of Greek and Danish descent. Together they have four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex. Elizabeth II has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

The Queen is interested in horse racing and breeding and is an accomplished equestrian. She also enjoys painting and photography.

Elizabeth II: Miscellaneous

• Elizabeth II is the queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms.
• She is married to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and has four children: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Andrew, Duke of York; and Edward, Earl of Wessex.
• She has eight grandchildren: Peter Phillips; Zara Tindall; Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex; Princess Beatrice of York; Princess Eugenie of York; Lady Louise Windsor; and James, Viscount Severn.
• Elizabeth II ascended the throne on 6 February 1952, upon the death of her father, King George VI.
• She is currently the oldest monarch in British history and has held numerous titles and orders during her long reign.

Queen Elizabeth II Essay, Speech, Biography, Family, Reign, & Facts

Name: Queen Elizabeth II

Description: Elizabeth II is the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms. She is also Queen of Canada and Head of the Commonwealth. Elizabeth II has been Queen since 1952, making her the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-serving queen regnant in world history.

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Essay on Queen Elizabeth

Students are often asked to write an essay on Queen Elizabeth in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Queen Elizabeth

Introduction.

Queen Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning monarch in British history. She was born on April 21, 1926, and became queen in 1952.

Elizabeth was born in London. Her father was King George VI and her mother was Queen Elizabeth. She had one sister, Princess Margaret.

Queen Elizabeth II became queen after her father’s death. She is known for her dedication to duty and her steadfast leadership.

Queen Elizabeth II is respected worldwide. Her reign has seen significant changes in the UK and across the globe. Her legacy will be remembered for years to come.

250 Words Essay on Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth II, born on April 21, 1926, is the longest-reigning monarch in British history. Her reign has seen significant transformations in society, politics, and technology, making her a living testament to the evolution of the modern world.

Born as Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II was not initially expected to become queen. However, her father’s ascension to the throne following the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, changed her life trajectory.

Accession and Reign

Elizabeth became queen at the age of 25, following the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952. Her coronation, a year later, was the first to be televised, symbolizing a new era of mass communication. Her reign has been marked by significant events such as the decolonization of Africa, the acceleration of devolution in the UK, and changes in public attitudes towards the monarchy.

Legacy and Influence

Queen Elizabeth II’s reign has been characterized by her dedication to duty, her stoicism, and her commitment to public service. Despite facing numerous challenges, she has remained a figure of continuity and stability. Her influence has extended beyond the UK, shaping the Commonwealth and impacting global politics.

Queen Elizabeth II’s reign has been a period of profound change. Her ability to adapt and remain relevant in a rapidly changing world is a testament to her enduring legacy. Her reign, while marked by controversy and change, has been a defining feature of the 20th and 21st centuries.

500 Words Essay on Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth II, born on April 21, 1926, has been the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom since 1952, making her the longest-serving current head of state. Her reign has been marked by significant changes both within the monarchy and the world at large, and her influence extends far beyond her nation’s borders.

Early Life and Ascension to the Throne

Born as Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor to the Duke and Duchess of York, later known as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), her life was destined to be extraordinary from the start. Initially, Elizabeth was not the direct heir to the throne, but her father’s unexpected ascension in 1936 after the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, drastically changed her fate. She was only 25 when she became queen in 1952, following her father’s death.

Modernizing the Monarchy

Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth II has been a stabilizing force during times of change and uncertainty, modernizing the monarchy to keep it relevant in the rapidly evolving world. She has embraced technology and change, from allowing the first-ever televised coronation to launching the royal family’s website. She has also broken with tradition in numerous ways, such as paying taxes on her income, making the monarchy more transparent and accessible to the public.

Political Neutrality and Influence

As a constitutional monarch, Queen Elizabeth II’s role is largely ceremonial, and she is expected to remain politically neutral. However, her influence is undeniable. Through her weekly meetings with the prime minister, she has worked closely with 14 prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson, subtly shaping the political landscape.

Queen Elizabeth and the Commonwealth

One of the queen’s most significant roles has been as the head of the Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organization of 54 member states, most of them former territories of the British Empire. She has used this role to promote unity, cultural understanding, and economic cooperation among member states.

Personal Life and Legacy

Married to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, for over 73 years until his death in 2021, Queen Elizabeth II has four children, eight grandchildren, and twelve great-grandchildren. Her resilience, dedication to duty, and steadfast commitment to public service have earned her respect and admiration worldwide. She has also been a symbol of continuity and stability in a world of constant change, leaving an indelible mark on the 20th and 21st centuries.

Queen Elizabeth II’s reign has been a period of unprecedented change and challenges. Through it all, she has demonstrated remarkable adaptability, leading the monarchy into the modern era while maintaining its historical traditions. Her longevity, dedication, and service make her a unique figure in contemporary history, and her legacy will undoubtedly continue to shape the monarchy and the Commonwealth for years to come.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Queen Elizabeth II — Queen Elizabeth II: Analysis of Her Behavior

Queen Elizabeth Ii: Analysis of Her Behavior

• Categories: Queen Elizabeth II

About this sample

Words: 1611 |

Published: Feb 12, 2019

Words: 1611 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Works Cited

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• History.com Editors. (2021). Queen Elizabeth II. History. https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/queen-elizabeth-ii
• Royal Collection Trust. (2022). Queen Elizabeth II. https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/people/queen-elizabeth-ii

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Photo of Queen Elizabeth II and family was enhanced at source, agency says

Getty Images flags second royal photo days after storm over image of Princess of Wales

A second photograph of members of the royal family has been flagged by a global picture agency after it was discovered to have been “digitally enhanced at source”.

Earlier this month, five international picture agencies that initially distributed an image of the Princess of Wales to mark Mother’s Day issued so-called “kill” notices to withdraw it, sparking a huge wave of commentary, speculation and even conspiracy theories.

On Wednesday, Getty Images had annotated a second photo, taken at Balmoral in August 2022 and released by Buckingham Palace on 21 April last year to mark what would have been the late queen’s 97th birthday, with guidance over its authenticity. It shows Elizabeth surrounded by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A spokesperson for Getty said: “Getty Images has reviewed the image in question and placed an editor’s note on it, stating that the image has been digitally enhanced at source.”

Among the discrepancies, some of which were flagged by the Observer on Sunday , are a vertical line where the tartan of the late queen’s skirt does not match, a dark shadow behind Prince Louis’ ear and a similar small black patch behind Prince George’s shirt collar.

The photo of Catherine and her three children, taken by the Prince of Wales and the first of the princess to be released since she underwent abdominal surgery in January, caused widespread speculation on social media.

After the picture agencies in effect withdrew the image, the princess released a brief, personal statement saying: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.”

Released at a time when conspiracy theories over her illness and absence had flooded social media, the image was meant to reassure the public of her recovery but backfired spectacularly, fuelling claims it could have been faked.

Such is the level of interest in the princess’s health that on Tuesday the Sun ran on its front page a grainy image of Catherine and William in Windsor under the headline “Great to see you again Kate”, adding in its report that the princess looked “happy and relaxed”.

The image of Queen Elizabeth II and her family was taken weeks before she died. Her grandchildren Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and James, Earl of Wessex, the children of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, are standing at the back. In front of them are Lena Tindall, the daughter of Mike and Zara Tindall; Prince George and Princess Charlotte, the two elder children of the Prince and Princess of Wales; Isla Phillips, the daughter of Peter Phillips; and Prince Louis, the youngest child of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

To the monarch’s right is Mia Tindall, holding baby Lucas Tindall, and to her left is Savannah Phillips.

Buckingham Palace has been contacted for comment.

• Queen Elizabeth II
• Catherine, Princess of Wales

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