Britain’s Elizabeth, the queen who moved with a changing world

GBNEWS24DESK//

The crowning achievement of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who died on Thursday after 70 years on the throne, was to maintain the popularity of the monarchy across decades of seismic political, social and cultural change that threatened to make it an anachronism.

A dignified, dependable figure who reigned longer than any other British monarch, Elizabeth helped steer the institution into the modern world, stripping away court ritual and making it somewhat more open and accessible, all in the glare of an increasingly intrusive and often hostile media.

While the nation she reigned over sometimes struggled to find its place in a new world order and her own family often fell foul of public expectations, the queen herself remained a symbol of stability. She also tried to transcend class barriers and earned the grudging respect of even hardened republicans.

To much of the world she was the personification of Britain, yet she remained something of an enigma as an individual, never giving an interview and rarely expressing emotion or offering a personal opinion in public – a woman recognised by millions but known by hardly anyone.

“I think she’s brought life, energy and passion to the job, she’s managed to modernise and evolve the monarchy like no other,” her grandson Prince William, who is now the heir to the throne, said in a television documentary in 2012.

THE YOUNG QUEEN

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born on April 21, 1926 at 17 Bruton Street in central London.

The young princess never expected to ascend to the throne: it was only after her uncle King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 because of his love for American divorcee Wallis Simpson that the crown passed to her father, George VI, when she was 10.

She was just 25 when her father died and she became Queen Elizabeth II on February 6, 1952, while on tour in Kenya with her husband Prince Philip. Winston Churchill was the first of 15 prime ministers who served during her reign.

“In a way I didn’t have an apprenticeship, my father died much too young and so it was all a very sudden kind of taking on, and making the best job you can,” she said in a 1992 documentary.

“It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing and accepting the fact that here you are and it’s your fate. It is a job for life.”

During her 70 years on the throne Britain underwent dramatic change.

The austere postwar 1950s gave way to the swinging 60s, the divisive leadership of Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, Tony Blair’s three-term New Labour era, a return to economic austerity and then the COVID-19 pandemic.

Labour and Conservative governments came and went, feminism changed attitudes to women, and Britain became a much more cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic society.

Elizabeth was on the throne for most of the Cold War from the death of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. During her reign there were 14 U.S. presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Joe Biden, and she met all bar Lyndon Johnson.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 exposed deep divisions in British society, while nationalists continued their push for a new referendum on Scottish independence that had the potential to rip apart the United Kingdom.