Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl/
But she doesn't have a lot to say/
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl/
But she changes from day to day
I wanna tell her that I love her a lot/
But I gotta get a belly full of wine/
Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl
Someday I'm gonna make her mine, oh yeah/
Someday I'm gonna make her mine...
-- "Her Majesty," The Beatles
What, you were expecting "The Queen Is Dead" by the Smiths???
I have to be seen to be believed.
-- Her Majesty, herself
Her Majesty Elizabeth, Second of Her Name, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, Auxiliary Mechanic in the Home Front during World War II, Whovian Fan Number One, passed from this earthly realm today and sent much of the world into reflection about one of the most extravagant and eventful lives ever lived.
Nearly every publication out there will have tributes aplenty, but I'm finding this one by Tom McTague from The Atlantic to be spot on:
...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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
If I could contribute to those thoughts: When we appraise the legacy of this queen Elizabeth the Second, we will note how she bookends the reign of the First Elizabeth, who presided over the rise of England as the foundation of a United Kingdom (as Wales, Ireland, and Scotland were slowly drawn by politics and wars to merge together) and the birth of the British Empire. Where the first Elizabeth saw its beginnings, the second witnessed - and took part in - the end of empire, replacing it with a more democratic nation-oriented Commonwealth.
It's not a clean legacy, obviously: the sins and bloodshed of colonization over the centuries do not wash off easy, and places like India and Pakistan have not forgiven some of the damage done. After I wrote this article, I've seen more angry reminders from the First Nations of Canada of how they suffered under the Residential Schools that brutally "re-educated" tribal children and caused a lot of abuse.
But Elizabeth strived to respect the new nations spun off from colonial rule, and oversaw transitions that for the most part led to stable, functioning governments. It allowed her to retain devotion from post-colonial countries that have otherwise dismissed European political dynamics for their own. It doesn't excuse the lack of apology and reparations, I know, but it explains a little why the condemnations were intermingled with the condolences.
Elizabeth's own reputation across the world is more popular than her nation's. The glamour of royalty - where she herself was never glamourous a person compared to movie stars or the Kennedys or her daughter-in-law Diana - combined with her constant public persona of Duty Personified gave her a personality both regal and comforting. Nations that had nothing to do with the British Empire came to see her as THE Queen. Even in America, where we pride ourselves on tossing off the yoke of British tyranny - take that, Farmer George! - there is/was a lot of Anglophilia when it came to QE2. We Americans recognized her more than we recognized (or respected) the Prime Ministers who actually ran the UK.
Queen Elizabeth was the face - literally for 70 years! - of a royal institution that had outlasted nearly every other monarchy. It survived through an age of rampant republicanism, having endured constant calls by those who sought to dismantle the Crown as a political force and replace it either with an elected presidency or all of the power granted to the parliamentary system. Even the staunchest critics of royalty fell silent when the question came up whether to end Elizabeth's rule: She was too popular to toss to the curb and they knew it.
Which is why her passing can very well be the end of an age. Not just her Elizabethan (Second) Age of British glory, which stood firm against Nazis and Communists, and gave us the Beatles and Monty Python and Harry Potter and other cultural milestones that will stand the test of time like Shakespeare. With the death of Elizabeth II comes the reality that her singular gift of keeping the Commonwealth united will soon end.
Even before today, there were member nations - especially in the Caribbean, led by Jamaica - openly discussing a switch to a republican form of government with their own elected heads of state. Whether they may even stay in the Commonwealth with other nations is up for debate. The situation with Brexit - where the United Kingdom itself is struggling with trade woes and economic stability - has placed strains on how the Commonwealth operates, and may not survive for long unless serious reforms take place... and the current Tory Parliament isn't looking at serious reforms. The respect for the Queen was pretty much the one thing keeping it all going. And she's gone.
Elizabeth lived and died as mortal as any of us, but she took on a role - Wearing the Queenly Mask - that required her to sacrifice moments of personal happiness for a nation's - and the world's - greater good. And it was on that mask that the rest of us across the globe projected our hopes, our fears, our ambitions, our mockery, and more. Not everybody loved her, nor the idea of monarchy. Whatever we needed of her, we saw... but it was a question of whether we could believe what we saw. In the end, her devotion and duty convinced most of us she was real.
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