Elizabeth II’s reign outlasted that of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria by seven years and, among the famous Monarchs of Europe, it was beaten only by that of the Sun King himself, Louis XIV of France.
Of course, her reign was about much more than mere staying-power. But, at this chilly moment, it’s worth spending a little time thinking about how long she was with us – all those decades when we lost our hats and our deference, acquired central heating and fridge-freezers, furiously kicked out failed prime ministers and then were freshly disenchanted with their successors, stopped using telephone boxes and started carrying little computers in our back pockets.
The journey from 1952 until now has been a long one, and she has been with us every pace.
The Queen’s 1953 Coronation was the first ever to be televised. In the wake of her death, Andrew Marr says: ‘The journey from 1952 until now has been a long one, and she has been with us every pace’
Today, of course, with better medicine and better living conditions, that isn’t surprising. Most people live longer. But the Queen has also been stamped through us, under the skin for almost all of our lives.
She has been living ‘over there’ – at Buckingham Palace, Windsor, Balmoral, on our television screens. But she has also been living inside us, nestling in our imaginations. Hence the atmosphere not only of deep national grief but also profound unsettlement.
For this is a deeply disquieting moment. It takes away one of the last places in our national life marked by calm and reassurance. To that extent, her death is as much about us as it is about her.
Andrew Marr: ‘She has been living ‘over there’ – at Buckingham Palace, Windsor, Balmoral, on our television screens. But she has also been living inside us, nestling in our imaginations’
All around, on every side, a great shaking is going on. We have pulled away from the European Union and are wondering ‘what next?’.
We are shaking off, just, a horrible pandemic that has taken 200,000 lives here.
Dislike and suspicion of the political class have rarely been higher. With a growing chorus from Scotland, the very future of the UK is in doubt. And now this.
Calmly contemplating his own mortality, Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift wrote in one of his poems: ‘The time is not remote when I/ Must by the course of nature die.’
And, of course, nothing is more natural. Yet at this moment in the life of this country, it is hard to avoid the thought that the death of this tough, elderly woman arrives like the blow of an axe.
There are few British people alive with a clear memory of life before the Queen. Money, postage stamps, ritual state occasions, oaths and pledges, the names on hospitals and boulevards, the national anthem… all her. Who among us has ever lifted a glass and said, ‘the King’?
Millions upon millions of us have dreamed of having conversations with her. Some may find this mildly embarrassing; but it is not ridiculous.
From Princess to Monarch, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor lived out our modern history in a way no other human being has.
She was familiar with Sir Winston Churchill and with the founder of the modern Welfare State, Clement Attlee. She was there when we left the EU, and when we joined the Common Market too. She was crowned an Empress and oversaw the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. She has sat with spies – even unwittingly employing a Soviet one – and taken tea with tyrants.
Andrew Marr: ‘She was familiar with Sir Winston Churchill and with the founder of the modern Welfare State, Clement Attlee. She was there when we left the EU, and when we joined the Common Market too’
She became Queen when much of Britain still used outside toilets and lived under a semi-perpetual fug of industrial smoke.
She has lived to see a country hunched over its smartphones and ringed by offshore wind farms. When the Crown was placed on her head, this archipelago was populated, overwhelmingly, by white people. At her death, it is a genuinely multicultural nation.
She has lived with us, through our triumphs and disasters, from the conquest of Everest, the 1966 World Cup and the 2012 London Olympics, to Aberfan, the winter of discontent, the miners’ strike, IRA bombings and the Iraq War. A mostly silent sentinel, she was there in the background, observed through our annual and political pageantry but watching and listening always.
The Queen and Prince Philip visiting the Welsh village Aberfan on October 29 1966 after the disaster
Millions who never met her, or saw her in the flesh, nevertheless felt that she was – somehow – alongside them, a member of a wider family. So she was.
Just as with Louis XIV, she reigned during serious and difficult times. Through the Cold War, Queen Elizabeth talked both with the Soviet leader Khrushchev, and with the US presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. She was on the bridge, on watch, during the most dangerous years the planet has faced so far; emergency preparation for a nuclear war of annihilation (the hidden bunkers, the nuclear clock ticking down, the fleet of V-bombers waiting on standby) was something she understood from the inside. Britain has lost her Queen. But she has also lost her greatest witness to history.
Part of the wartime generation, the Queen was marked from the first by an almost forbidding sense of duty. She never had an ordinary childhood. There was no school classroom, no wide circle of friends.
Since growing up, too, she mostly lived apart from normal life, inside calm and protected spaces. The hushed apartments of grand private houses and palaces. The fields and woods of Norfolk, the whispering glens and rivers around Balmoral. But the noisy and unpredictable world was always nearby.
The Queen was born on April 21, 1926, by caesarian section, in a quiet private house in Bruton Street, Mayfair, Central London. If you think we are living through febrile times today, try the 1920s.
Within a fortnight, her grandfather King George V would be confronted by the General Strike.
The King had some private sympathy with the cause of the coal miners but to many this seemed a revolutionary moment. The newly born baby was only third in line to the throne behind two strong and relatively young men, her uncle and father.
Her parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, gave her a warm and affectionate early upbringing and she had a reasonable expectation of living her life as a landed lady, a quietly dwelling shire counties wife and mother whose world would be bounded by agriculture, horses and seasons. Meanwhile, she grew up with her sister Margaret as her main companion, surrounded by horses and gentle horseplay.
Andrew Marr: ‘People I’ve talked to who knew her well say that she had quite a wicked sense of humour, and was an excellent mimic. But rather than compromise her constitutional role, she preferred to be seen from the outside as boring. In the modern world, that’s quite a sacrifice’
All this was suddenly shattered by the 1936 Abdication Crisis when King Edward VIII, ‘Uncle David’, renounced the throne because he could not bear to be parted from the love of his life, Wallis Simpson.
This catapulted Princess Elizabeth at once from a home of charades and family informality into the dim, echoing, mice-infested corridors of Buckingham Palace. She was told she suddenly had to curtsy to her father as King, whenever he appeared. It became obvious that, at some point in the future, she would be Queen. So the Abdication was, really, the pivotal moment of the Queen’s life. Everything after the ‘after’ was fundamentally different from the ‘before’. She was, by all accounts, a serious-minded, pious and dutiful girl, albeit with a strong sense of humour. The emphasis on duty was, of course, underscored and buttoned down during the Second World War. Moved to Windsor Castle, which was surrounded by sandbags and anti-aircraft guns, she was not, really, much protected from reality.
In September 1940 her parents came quite close to death during a German air raid on Buckingham Palace, while Philip – the naval cadet she had first cast eyes on in 1939 – was already away serving in the Royal Navy.
The young princess joined the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, learning to service trucks, drive cars, and to take apart engines – as well as drilling and marching, which she would then spend her adult life observing. All this matters because, like most of her generation, she was marked indelibly by the war experience. Don’t complain. Keep going. Do your bit. Shrug off bad news. Grab on to the consolations and rituals of your religion.
These ‘stiff-upper-lip’ lessons from the first half of the 1940s go a long way to explaining how the Queen did her job in modern times.
Most of us, these days, are brought up to believe that ‘be yourself’ is the ultimate contemporary commandment. Let us express ourselves, celebrate our inner individuality as vibrantly and robustly as possible, and gaily throw off the shackles of society and its institutions.
Throughout her life, the Queen behaved almost in opposition to this. She kept her private views deeply private, very rarely joked or talked about herself, and devoted her time to upholding institutions. The grander the institutional Monarchy, with its clatter of cavalry, bugles, flags and castles, the humbler and more parsimonious the Monarch’s daily life, with its Racing Post, Tupperware boxes of food and quiet evenings in front of the television set.
People I’ve talked to who knew her well say that she had quite a wicked sense of humour, and was an excellent mimic. But rather than compromise her constitutional role, she preferred to be seen from the outside as boring. In the modern world, that’s quite a sacrifice.
She was an enthusiast for the glamour and swagger of Monarchy: ‘I have to be seen to be believed,’ she would say. But she never confused herself as Monarch with herself as a private person.
So she took being a Queen entirely seriously, without taking herself very seriously. The role was always more important to her than the individual.
In the same way, the Queen, who for much of her life was the most famous woman on the planet, was never a ‘celebrity’ representative for Britain around the world.
Now, nobody who flies in by official jet, or lands from RY Britannia and travels around by Rolls-Royce, horse-and-carriage or private train, can exactly be described as self-effacing. And she always took great care to look good.
But the Queen was somehow the antithesis of ‘cool’ or ‘funky’, show-off or self-obsessed.
There were many cool and funky Britons around the world, but she seemed more knowing and a grown-up than all of that.
‘But what’s she really like?’ In our exhibitionist society, we all want to be asked that. It’s the key question. But her answer was, in effect, ‘that doesn’t matter’. Isn’t it interesting that, on her death, the response to this most unmodern way of living, rooted in the war years, has been an outpouring of love?
There is another way in which the Queen was even less fashionable than was often realised. In an age when so many Britons stay away from church and no longer consider themselves religious, she was an entirely serious and devout Christian.
She prayed daily and took the traditional view that she had been anointed Queen by God as the plain truth. This gave her an inner steeliness and determination, even when it seemed to put her out of step with the changing society around her – as when she spoke out against the evils of divorce in the 1950s not knowing, of course, what her own family would soon face.
The paradox of Monarchy, its greatest strength and its greatest weakness, is that it is both national institution and private family. If one leading Royal disgraces themselves or simply isn’t up to it, there are always replacements at hand.
Andrew Marr: ‘First and foremost, it implants a longer sense of time into the state system. The reign of Queen Elizabeth gave Britain a longer official memory and a further forward perspective, than might have been the case under Presidents Wilson, Thatcher, Blair or Johnson’
But, by the same token, there are plenty of members of ‘the firm’ who might at any point bring it into disrepute. Ten thousand well-remunerated historians have made good lifelong livings by burrowing into this. But from Edward II to Charles as Prince of Wales, from Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, to modern London’s Duke of York, the subject never loses interest.
The Queen, therefore, was very lucky to marry a man who stood at her side with prickly loyalty all her life. No account of her can safely omit the Duke of Edinburgh, the lanky, homeless and relatively penniless Greek prince in exile she fell in love with as a teenager.
Proud, driven, spiky, impatient and fiercely intelligent, he was never an easy second-fiddle-playing consort. As in all marriages there were downs as well as ups. But more judgmental than she has been, and much readier to wade into public controversies, the Duke provided a sharp edge to the Monarchy during her reign.
It has become a commonplace that between them, they did not bring up the Prince of Wales as kindly as they might have done. The always sensitive son of a sometimes insensitive father, sent off to a Scottish boarding school he disliked, then thrust into the public eye as a nervous young man, Prince Charles never had it easy. His catastrophic marriage to Diana Spencer would come as close as anything during the Queen’s reign to shaking the whole institution.
Then there is the story about Prince Andrew… then, a generation down, the feud between William and Harry…
Even as we mourn a Queen who has straddled our lives, and as we reflect on the extraordinary changes this country has seen during her reign, it’s impossible to avoid the flaws and failures of today’s House of Windsor. Every life is also a story of falling short and contains regrets. Every family, ditto. Only the stupidly unobservant think that wealth and fame bring happiness.
Andrew Marr: ‘The Queen must have worried about her wider family, a lot, and asked herself whether, in the midst of her working life, she could have done more. She certainly thought about these things’
The Queen must have worried about her wider family, a lot, and asked herself whether, in the midst of her working life, she could have done more. She certainly thought about these things.
After watching episodes of the recent television series The Crown, she told one of those involved in making it that it had caused her to re-evaluate her relationship with her sister Margaret. The least we can say is that her stoicism, faith and sense of humour helped to keep her eye on the bigger picture during the darkest days.
This writer is not, by instinct, a Monarchist. That is, I rather like the idea of being able to sack the people at the top of the pyramid of state. However, having observed the Queen for a long time, I have to admit Monarchy has special advantages.
First and foremost, it implants a longer sense of time into the state system. The reign of Queen Elizabeth gave Britain a longer official memory and a further forward perspective, than might have been the case under Presidents Wilson, Thatcher, Blair or Johnson.
And, of course, it has been easier for the country to rally around her than it would have been to rally round any of them.
A Monarch worries about what kind of country the great-great grandchildren might inherit – how happy its people, how green, fertile and clean its environment – in ways that wouldn’t occur to politicians thinking about being in power for three to five years, and then getting out quick.
King Charles’s interest in the environment, urban as well as rural, comes from his sense of stewardship and its longevity. In our comparatively dirty and fast-warming world, this is no small thing.
Similarly, in the midst of any passing crisis, a Monarch as experienced as she has been, is able to look back and remember tougher moments, and so offer advice that literally nobody else could. Thus, dealing with politicians, she can be a calming, reassuring source of perspective – the opposite, as it were, of the daily media frenzy.
Only her prime ministers, who have not spoken frankly about this can tell us whether the Queen was that kind of Monarch.
But I would be amazed if she hadn’t been. Somebody able to say ‘when we were in trouble at Suez’ or ‘Harold told me he faced just that dilemma with Tony Benn’ is an extraordinary private advantage to the political system.
What I saw with my own eyes is another, rarely discussed, part of her official story.
A decade ago I followed her around for the BBC to make a documentary film for her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. I was trying to understand what the Queen actually did, day by day – to conjugate, as it were, the verb ‘to reign’. So I trailed around, observing honours being awarded at St James’s Palace, receptions at Buckingham Palace, dusty and baking-hot foreign visits from Oman to Australia, and domestic visits from Edinburgh to Welshpool.
Andrew Marr: ‘There has never been anybody remotely like her before. There will never be anyone remotely like her again’
I learned to live by the old Army instruction ‘hurry up and wait’. She wasn’t a young woman even then, but the Queen was working ferociously hard and much of what she was doing was the reverse of glamorous – meeting care workers, Scout leaders, nurses, hill farmers, stallholders and vintage railway enthusiasts. It’s true that she had devised the art of saying hello and goodbye almost simultaneously. But she did it of necessity, to meet the maximum number of people possible and I have rarely seen so many helpless grins in my life. ‘We are in the happiness business,’ one of her ladies-in-waiting told me. If there was an agenda to the domestic visits, it seemed that she was picking groups the national media largely ignored. This was like a parallel, Britain-in-the-shadows of everyday, not-particularly-angry people, doing something extra for their communities far from the glare of politics, or celebrity.
When she arrived, they were being honoured, noticed, respected. And she would stand for hours in wet weather, or walk slowly along endless queues of extended hands, or turn up late on the cold evening, after a long day, to perform this hidden but essential duty.
Since then, I have occasionally wondered whether, if we have been spared a full-throttle era of angry populism, if the Queen is part of the reason. If so, we have now lost that reason. There has never been anybody remotely like her before. There will never be anyone remotely like her again.
But throughout that long reign she was, in her quiet, almost expressionless way, teaching us something about ourselves. We owe it to our future to think about what it was.