Friday 16 September 2022
Queen Elizabeth II leaves Toronto during her 12-day Golden Jubilee tour of Canada in October 2002. More photos below and in the gallery
Queen Elizabeth II leaves Toronto during her 12-day Golden Jubilee tour of Canada in October 2002. More photos below and in the gallery
Margaret Duggan writes:
“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 Commonwealth to which we all belong.” It was a high girlish voice speaking on the radio from South Africa, almost embarrassing in its sincerity; but no vow has been more profoundly and religiously kept than that made by the Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday.
She was not born to be Queen, just as her father did not expect to be King, and yet it has been the greatest good fortune for the United Kingdom, and for nations far beyond, that such a succession came to pass with two monarchs who both, from unlikely beginnings, rose to the demands of their generations: George VI with great personal courage, and Elizabeth II with deep religious commitment.
Princess Elizabeth had an advantage that possibly no other monarch has had in our island’s history. With her sister, Margaret, she grew up in a loving family that tried to live as normal and happy a life as possible within the expected constraints of nannies, maids, governesses, tutors, formal manners, and carefully selected friends. It was their mother, the then Queen Elizabeth, who nurtured their Christian faith, developing a love of the Psalms and collects and the language of the Authorised Version. She also taught them to kneel, like herself, at their bedside for their night-time prayers. A preference for the traditional liturgy and language remained with Elizabeth all her life.
A more serious, dutiful, and shy girl than her livelier sister, Elizabeth found much of her happiness with dogs and ponies, but she was particularly close to her father. She was ten years old when news was brought that he had become King, and it was her younger sister who immediately pointed out the implication for Elizabeth. “Poor you,” said Margaret.
Changes came, and they moved into Buckingham Palace. Her education, which had always had a limited academic content, was broadened to include a thorough grounding in constitutional history, an ability to read and comprehend at speed, and fluency in French. She had been brought up with formal manners, and her grandmother, Queen Mary, who wore a tiara even when she was dining alone at home with her husband, enforced the protocol of royalty. The young princess should show no emotion in public. She had been brought up never to cry, nor, according to the example set by her grandmother, should she smile. Even her young friends had to curtsey and call her Ma’am when they arrived.
alamyPrincess Elizabeth with her sister, Princess Margaret, and their parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the princesses’ playhouse
But in private she could giggle with amusement and had an acute sense of the ridiculous, which lasted all her life. Only quite late in her life did it become known that sometimes, when she looked particularly severe on formal occasions, she was trying not to laugh.
The war came, and the two princesses were moved to the comparative safety of Windsor Castle, while their parents spent most of their days in London, sharing the traumas of the Blitz with their subjects. Even at Windsor, the family was not safe from bombs, though they enjoyed games and picnics and dressing up. But, for the first time, the Princesses came into close contact with girls from very different backgrounds when the Girl Guide troop that they had belonged to, with its carefully vetted members, was expanded to include children bombed out of the East End, who stood no nonsense with “Ma’am”, but happily called the future Queen “Lilibet”, a name supposed to be strictly limited to her close family.
It was at Windsor that Elizabeth celebrated her 18th birthday and became eligible to join the ATS, where she learned to drive and service cars and trucks, skills of which she remained proud.
These were the years when she got to know a young and penniless Greek prince, Philip. While she was secure in her family’s affection, learning to be a queen, he was at boarding school, his mother in a Swiss sanatorium, his father on the south coast of France with his mistress, leaving Philip never knowing which family member he would spend his next holiday with. It could be with the Mountbattens in England, or one of his four sisters, all married to German princes. He developed a strong resilience, covering his private feelings with a debonair energy. When he left Gordonstoun School, he found himself having to choose between the Greek and British navies, and settled for a commission in the Royal Navy. It was as a dashing young Sub-Lieutenant that, on his occasional visits, he won the heart of the Princess.
THE Queen has died aged 96, after reigning for 70 years, Buckingham Palace said in a statement on Thursday evening
He had a good war record, and his uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, lost no opportunity to promote the marriage. The war ended in 1945 and gave the two Princesses one of their rare chances to go out and mingle with the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on VE night. By this time, Philip had proposed, but the King was loath to lose his beloved daughter, and the royal family embarked on a tour of South Africa. It was from there that the Princess made her speech of dedication on her 21st birthday. On their return, Elizabeth made it clear that her feelings had not changed, and the wedding was announced for 20 November 1947.
It was a bright moment in a time when Britain was at the depth of the dreary impoverishment of the post-war years, with both food and clothes still strictly rationed. The public welcomed the celebration, and gifts poured in from all quarters, including clothing coupons, hand-knitted jumpers, and food from both the British public and the Commonwealth. (After it had been displayed before the wedding, much of it was distributed to needier recipients.) Prince Philip, who had been brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church, was received into the Church of England in a private ceremony by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher.
The wedding was celebrated in Westminster Abbey with a congregation of some 2000 people, including almost all the kings and queens — both regnant and exiled — of Europe. Dr Fisher conducted the ceremony with Elizabeth, Heiress to the Throne, making the traditional promise “to love, cherish and obey” her husband. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, gave the address. The wedding, he said, was “in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been to any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some country church in a remote village in the Dales”.
After the unaccustomed freedom of married life in London, moving into Clarence House, Elizabeth’s pregnancy, and the birth of their first child, Prince Charles, Philip was recalled to the Navy and posted to Malta. Elizabeth joined him there for perhaps the happiest interlude in her life, when she could live as a naval wife (albeit with rather more staff than most), driving herself round the island, socialising with friends, and shopping like any other well-to-do young woman. She had left her baby behind in the care of her parents and nannies, and it was noticed that, on her return, she spent four days catching up on correspondence and going to the races before being reunited with her son. Her motherly instincts were allowed fuller rein with her later children.
Again pregnant, she returned to London for the birth of Princess Anne in August 1950, and by this time there was already concern for the King’s health. He was diagnosed with cancer of the lung, and Princess Elizabeth increasingly took over engagements that he could not manage, presiding at the Privy Council, and riding at the head of the troops for the Trooping the Colour.
alamyPrincess Elizabeth leaving Westminster Abbey after her marriage to Prince Philip in 1947, wearing Queen Mary’s tiara
Prince Philip, with the deepest regret, had to give up his career in the Royal Navy, where he had recently been given his first command, to spend a life — physically or metaphorically — two paces behind his wife. The trauma for him should never be underestimated. Still young, active, and ambitious, he found himself without a proper job, despised and mistrusted by many of the stuffier courtiers who surrounded his wife, and shut out of much of her official life. About the latter, Elizabeth could do nothing, but she made over the running of their domestic life to him, and, in their private lives, the traditional wedding vow held good.
During the 1951 election campaign, the couple went on a long tour of Canada and returned to a change of government from the years of Labour to the return of Winston Churchill. Early the following year, Elizabeth and Philip again had to go travelling, when it was clear that the King could not undertake a promised tour of East Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Looking very ill, the King waved her off, but it was still unexpected when he was found to have died in his sleep just a week later. It was Philip who broke the news to his wife. With the stoicism of her upbringing, she immediately began to write letters of apology for cancelling the rest of their trip, and preparing for their return home, the couple dressed in the mourning black always packed as a precaution on royal tours.
Back in England, the 25-year-old Queen took up her new duties with a serious steadfastness. If she shed tears at her father’s funeral, they were hidden by the long black veil that she wore, like her mother and grandmother. George VI was genuinely mourned by most of the population, but there was also an undercurrent of excitement which grew steadily about a young and glamorous Queen and a New Elizabethan Age. For the first time, the Coronation was a truly popular event. The country was ready for a party, and television was becoming available.
THE Archbishop of Canterbury has praised the “patient, humble, selfless” Christian service of the late Queen, as tributes poured in after her death on Thursday evening
It took a year in the planning, the date fixed for 2 June 1953, though Queen Mary did not live to see it. The new Queen’s grandmother, who had done so much to shape her character, died that March. By that time, the battle over whether the actual Coronation should be televised had been won. That television cameras should be allowed in the Abbey was opposed not only by the Dean and Chapter, alarmed that the public might be watching the religious service “over the coffee cups”, but also by Fisher, plus the Duke of Norfolk with his hereditary office of overseeing the ceremony, despite his Roman Catholicism, the old guard of Buckingham Palace, and, most of all, by Churchill, again Prime Minister. The Queen herself was said to be reluctant; but persistent wooing by the BBC and huge public demand won the day.
Both the Queen and the Archbishop took the religious element of the ceremony with extreme seriousness, and Dr Fisher became her father-in-God in a way that no other bishop would become and confirmed in her a 1950s style of Anglicanism which she never outgrew.
In the weeks before the event, the Archbishop preached a series of sermons on its spiritual dimension: how the Queen was “God-called”. The Coronation was not about power, but about sacrifice. The Anointing at the service would bring the Queen into a special relationship with God, which was based on self-denial and the acceptance of the demands that would be made upon her. As for Elizabeth, she studied the service and rehearsed it assiduously. Meanwhile the planning of processions, decorations, and street parties went on all around them.
alamyPrincess Elizabeth walking in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, in 1947
Does God ever answer prayers about the weather? The second day of June 1953 dawned exceptionally cold and wet. But the thousands of people who had spent the night lining the processional route maintained their good spirits, and the street parties were undaunted. It was the maids of honour who shivered in their sleeveless dresses as they waited for the Queen and Prince Philip to arrive at the Abbey in the golden Coronation coach.
The Anointing was recognised as the most moving and solemn moment of the ceremony. After the magnificence of the procession and the acclamations of Vivat Regina, the moment came when the serious-faced young woman was hidden from public view by a canopy carried by Knights of the Garter, divested of her gorgeous robes, and, in a simple white dress, was anointed by the Archbishop on her hands, breast, and head with holy oil compounded from ambergris, musk, orange, jasmine, and rosewater by the royal apothecary from an ancient formula.
“. . . As Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated Queen over the Peoples, whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern,” the Archbishop said. Her robes were restored, the ceremony went on, and, as the Archbishop held the heavy crown above her head, a witness recorded that her expression was “one of intense expectancy”.
She had to learn to be Queen. Having Churchill as Prime Minister was very much a mixed blessing, as she admitted many years later. He had a serious stroke soon after the Coronation, but refused to resign what he considered his fatherly charge over the young Queen, though he disliked her husband and his family, blaming Lord Mountbatten for the loss of India. When at last he did go, she was not much better off with Anthony Eden, who was close to embroiling her in the lies surrounding the Suez crisis.
Her private secretary, Michael Adeane, was also a traditional conservative, and it was a long time before she herself made any cracks in the rigid mould. But at the weekly audiences she learned to listen and to question her prime ministers, never stating her views, but by her very questions turning a formal occasion into a fruitful one.
A more personal crisis early in her reign concerned her sister. Princess Margaret had fallen in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, an RAF hero appointed as equerry to the King in 1944 and recently Master of the Household. Rumours had started to circulate about their relationship when she was seen intimately brushing his lapel at the Coronation, and soon there was wide speculation about another royal marriage in the press.
Townsend was well liked by both the Queen and her husband, but not only had he had none of the royal connections still expected for spouses of royals so close to the throne: the great stumbling block was that he had had an early and unhappy wartime marriage and been divorced.
When the rumours broke into the open in the press, there was a furore. The Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, told Townsend he was “either bad or mad” to think of such a marriage. High Church Anglicans (of which Princess Margaret herself had become one during her period of grief for her father) were outraged, and Townsend himself was suddenly sent to a sinecure job in Belgium. The Queen was understood to be sympathetic about her sister’s plight; but, in any case, Margaret would have needed her permission to marry before the age of 25, which was some way off.
Graham James pays tribute to the Queen’s steady faith in an age of change
alamyCountry dancing with Prince Philip in Ottawa, Canada, in October 1951
Not too many years before, their uncle had been forced to abdicate because he wanted to marry a divorced woman, and with that memory, and the fact that, in her Coronation Oath, she had vowed to uphold the highest standards of Christian family values, Elizabeth was Queen first and sister second. Princess Margaret publicly renounced what she saw as her future happiness.
All too soon came the Suez crisis, when Colonel Nasser of Egypt proposed to nationalise the Suez Canal, and the French, British, and Israelis determined to invade the area. There was controversial and underhand dealing, out of which Eden did not come well. How far the Queen was involved was never clear, but it ended in Eden’s resignation and his replacement as Prime Minister by another Tory grandee, Harold Macmillan, more relaxed than his predecessors, who greatly enjoyed his weekly sessions with her.
By this time, Elizabeth had gained in experience and began to show her steely determination. A visit to Ghana had been delayed by her third pregnancy, by which time it was clear that President Nkrumah had become a dictator, and older heads believed that it would be too dangerous for the Queen to go. She declared she meant to be a Queen, not a puppet, and, if she failed to go, it would leave the way open for a Russian state visit by Khrushchev, and “how silly should I look”. She went. She danced with Nkrumah and was hailed by the Ghanaians as “the greatest socialist monarch in the world”.
But it did not stop her and her court coming in for acid criticism by Lord Altrincham of the stuffiness of court protocol and the Queen’s own style of speaking, which he described as that of a “priggish schoolgirl . . . a recent candidate for Confirmation”. In the non-news days of August 1957, it created a furore of protest, Altrincham being supported by Malcolm Muggeridge.
But it did have its effect. The Queen no longer resisted appearing on television for her Christmas broadcast, which, through the years, always had a strongly Christian message. She had also begun to dispense with some of the aristocratic flummery of royalty, bringing to an end the debutantes’ Presentation balls, introducing the Royal Garden Parties instead, and inviting small groups of distinguished members of the public to lunch.
Another innovation came about at Windsor, always her favourite home, where she would if possible spend her weekends. Rather than the grand St George’s Chapel, she chose to go on Sundays to the church in the Great Park, where, with the regular congregation, she attended matins — never more than 45 minutes, including the sermon. The deanery of the Chapel had become vacant, and it was in the Queen’s own gift, as the Dean of Windsor traditionally had a close relationship with the royal family. Her choice, undoubtedly in consultation with Prince Philip, fell on Canon Robin Woods, regarded by many as a turbulent priest who had done dynamic work in Singapore and the Sheffield diocese.
In 1962, he was persuaded to Windsor with the Queen’s hope that he would make the considerable resources of St George’s of use to the wider Church. The Woods’ family — their children were much the same ages as the royal children — became valued family friends, and the Dean, in partnership with Prince Philip and with the interest of the Queen, developed St George’s House as a regular meeting place for lay people from all walks of life to consider the problems of modern society.
alamyVisit to the Lindsay Park Stud in South Australia, in 1977
Royal Christmases were spent on the country estate of Sandringham in the diocese of Norwich, and so the Bishop of Norwich was also closer to the family and more frequently invited to stay the weekend and preach than the many other bishops who would receive invitations. They were very quiet weekends. One such bishop remarks that he had never played so many games of Patience to while away the winter afternoons.
Obeying the Prayer Book rule of three communions a year, the Queen would make her communion at the private 9 a.m. service in the parish church before returning to Sandringham House and arriving back at church with all the family for ten-o’clock matins. As for summers at Balmoral, she had no difficulty in adopting the ways of the Church of Scotland and regularly attending the morning service according to their rite. It was a matter of genuine distress to her on the very rare occasions that illness prevented her Sunday observance.
Harold Macmillan was succeeded in 1963 as Prime Minister by the Scottish laird who had had to renounce his title to stand as an MP. Despite early popularity in influential circles, Alec Douglas-Home was not a success, and an early election in 1964 brought the Queen’s first Labour Prime Minister. Harold Wilson soon became as devoted to the Queen as Macmillan, and his audiences with her grew steadily longer. As all Prime Ministers but one have declared, they value their weekly sessions with her as the one person they can talk freely and confidentially, knowing that nothing will ever be leaked.
The country was entering the decade of change and social revolution, the disappearance of the old deference, and the rise of sexual freedom, drugs, and the teenager. A streak of republicanism was in the mix. Tony Benn, for example, who had also given up his title for a seat in the Commons had, as Postmaster General, been scheming to change the design of British postage stamps, long distinguished by bearing the head of the Sovereign without the name of the country. He took his new stamp designs to the Queen, who smiled and frowned and made little comment, and Benn left under the impression that she would agree. But behind the scenes it was made clear she was “not too happy” about it, and it did not happen. The Queen was perfecting her habit of discouragement or disapproval by staying silent, or with a blank stare.
THE officers of the General Synod and the Archbishops’ Council have sent a message of condolence to the King
She lived through criticism and reform of the royal finances, the break with Rhodesia, and Amin’s persecution of the Ugandan Asians, which sent many of them fleeing to the UK. The Commonwealth, which meant so much to the Queen, was breaking up. To project a new and more positive image of the royal family, she agreed to a documentary about the life of her family both on formal and relaxed occasions, showing Price Philip cooking at a barbecue while she herself cleared dishes and washed up: in other words, they were “just like us”. In June 1969, no fewer than 23 million people watched it. Whether it was a good or bad thing, it inevitably led to many more documentaries by various members of the family.
The following year brought the Inauguration of the first General Synod, with an impressive service in Westminster Abbey, which the Queen, accompanied by her husband, attended before going on to address the full Synod in Church House. It set the pattern for the Inauguration at the start of every five-year cycle when a new Synod was elected. They were occasions that marked the Queen’s position as Supreme Governor of the Church and her close interest in its welfare, and were the only occasions on which the Queen received communion in public.
alamyOpening the ninth General Synod in November 2010 with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Duke of Edinburgh
But, though the Archbishops of Canterbury were the Primates of the Church, her relationship with them was rarely more than formal. In national life, they were the first in order of precedence of the Great Officers of State (the Archbishops of York and Wales were third and fourth), always expected to be present on state occasions, but it was the clergy connected with the royal palaces who were closer to the Queen. It is thought that she was fond of Archbishop Robert Runcie, who was always careful to approach her through her courtiers, but another who tried to set up regular meetings with her was gently put in his place.
While the public were enjoying increasing prosperity and a swinging lifestyle, the Queen and her Government were facing a very real fear of nuclear war and a more immediate civil war in Northern Ireland. By this time, Wilson had been replaced by the difficult personality of Edward Heath, who, like all previous Prime Ministers, found his Tuesday-evening private sessions with the Queen immensely valuable, even therapeutic. It was under his premiership that Britain joined the European Economic Community, to which the Queen appeared to give her blessing. James Callaghan followed.
But, at the same time, the conflict in Northern Ireland was growing, with bombs and bomb scares part of the daily life of Londoners and other main cities. It came very close to the Queen when Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, with one of his twin grandsons, was killed while fishing in Northern Ireland. The twin also suffered injuries, and, as soon as he was well enough, the Queen took him to Balmoral under her motherly care. Meanwhile, IRA bombs were being planted and exploding not only in several areas in London, but also in Manchester and other parts of the country.
Her Majesty’s personal courage showed when a disturbed man managed to climb the Buckingham Palace wall and she woke up to find him sitting on her bed. She calmly kept him talking until she managed to leave her bedroom to get help. It was the same sort of sangfroid as she showed when, as she was leading her troops on to Horse Guards Parade for the annual Trooping of the Colour, three shots were fired at her. She carried on, soothing her horse as she went, only learning later that the shots were blanks.
The one Prime Minister who did not look forward to Tuesday evenings with the Queen was Margaret Thatcher. The discomfort was felt on both sides. The Queen was always more at her ease with men, and Mrs Thatcher was over-punctilious in the depth of her curtseys and her respectful formalities, and particularly uncomfortable faced with the country-house atmosphere of Balmoral when invited to the regular Prime Ministers’ weekends. Nor was the Queen happy with Mrs Thatcher’s polarising brand of politics; but they warmed to each other as time went on.
alamyThe Queen in 1985 with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, and five of the latter’s predecessors (from left): Lord Callaghan of Cardiff; Lord Home of the Hirsel; Lord Stockton; Lord Wilson of Rievaulx; and Sir Edward Heath
It was in 1981 that Charles married Diana, with all that marriage’s unhappy consequences. Media and people seemed to fall in love en masse with the downcast eyes and shy smile of the bride. But ages and tastes were too dissimilar, and the marriage could not last. By 1987, it had broken down, and both were having affairs. Increasingly, the media became obsessed with the royal family soap opera as Prince Andrew made a similarly disastrous marriage to Sarah Ferguson and even the sober and industrious Princess Anne’s marriage broke down.
The year 1992 was to prove the worst so far of the Queen’s reign. Even she called it her annus horribilis. In March, it was announced that Prince Andrew and his wife were to separate, and Princess Anne quietly divorced. Then came the bombshell of the publication of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her true story, written in collaboration with the Princess herself, who had spared no detail of her failed marriage. For the Queen, brought up with all the protocols of royal privacy and with a profound belief in the sanctity of marriage, this must have been unbearable. And Diana did not leave it there. She exploited every photo opportunity as the forlorn victim of a cold and uncaring family-in-law.
Popular opinion rallied to her, and drove Charles to try to tell his side of the story in public. It seemed as if nothing could get worse. Then, in November, fire broke out in the historic apartments of Windsor Castle, the Queen’s favourite home. When it was known that the estimate for the repairs and restoration would cost £40 million of public money, there was an outcry. (The Queen eventually paid from her private wealth, and the money was successfully recovered from opening Buckingham Palace to the public, which proved very popular.)
The year ended with the formal separation of Charles and Diana, and the following year proved not much better. Prince Charles authorised a biography by Jonathan Dimbleby which spelt out his unhappy childhood, his failed marriage, and his return to his first love, Camilla Parker-Bowles, which is said to have horrified the Queen. Meanwhile, she carried on with her load of public engagements against the background of family scandal, Diana upstaging her husband at every turn. A low point was Diana’s Panorama broadcast, when she cast doubt on both the Queen’s and Charles’s competence to reign. At this point, the Queen decided that the couple must divorce.
The final trauma of Diana’s death in a Paris tunnel along with that of her latest lover, Dodi Al Fayed, shook the whole nation in 1997. It was probably the lowest point of the national regard for the Queen, who stayed where she was at Balmoral, helping her two grandsons to cope with their mother’s loss. The public demanded that she should return to London and “share the public grief”, and her new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, rang her up to urge it and convince her that she could not shelter in privacy. She came back with dignity and, on the eve of Diana’s funeral, broadcast to the nation that she, like others, had been trying to cope “in our different ways” and had been trying to understand how the world was united in grief, and “there were lessons to be learned.” Learn them she slowly and carefully did.
Her relationship with Tony Blair was not the easiest, as he himself took on an increasingly presidential role, and New Labour set about modernising Britain. But he did support her when it mattered. The heavy blows on the royal family did not cease. Early in 2002, Princess Margaret, ailing for a long time, died, as did the 101-year-old Queen Elizabeth, the much-loved Queen Mother, only six weeks later. Both had been very close to the Queen, and the double loss came in the year of her Golden Jubilee. But it was then that the tide began to turn, when millions celebrated with her and her family.
alamyThe Queen’s speech in Guildhall, in London, in 1992, when she referred to her “annus horribilis”, which included family rifts and the fire at Windsor Castle
In the following years, she steadily lost some of the formality that had always surrounded her, preferring more informal gatherings, meeting more people from the wider population. Opening Buckingham Palace as a tourist attraction each summer and bringing in younger and more flexible staff at every level, from private secretaries to the footmen and cleaners, ready to do each other’s jobs when required, the Palace acquired the reputation as an excellent employer. Economies were made, but the affairs of State, the Opening of Parliament, the meeting of ambassadors, the investitures, the inauguration of General Synods, and the everlasting red boxes went on. The Queen’s 80th birthday in 2006 was celebrated with a children’s party and fireworks. And, through it all, she was sustained by a loving marriage and a family who themselves settled down and drew closer.
There was talk of her abdication as she got older, and Prince Charles was steadily regaining favour. He, and Camilla, who had been long divorced, had been openly living together for some time. The happiness of the couple was clear, and it seemed obvious to all that knew them that they should marry, but the situation was delicate. Not only was Charles heir and would one day be Supreme Governor of the Church of England: it was also remembered that, within the Queen’s lifetime, her uncle, Edward VIII, had been forced to abdicate over the desire to marry a divorced woman. And even her own sister had been pressured to renounce a divorced man who had probably been the love of her life.
But the world and the Church of England had changed. Archbishop George Carey spoke of Christianity as being about forgiveness, and his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, took the same view, saying that Charles, as a committed Anglican, could still be Supreme Governor. The Queen had always been a deeply traditional churchwoman, but she could also see that Charles was probably happier than he had ever been in his life. She compromised, and the couple settled for a civil ceremony in Windsor Guildhall, which the Queen did not attend, followed by a service of blessing in St George’s Chapel, which she did. Treading lightly, Camilla, who shared so much of the Queen’s background and love of country life, gradually became accepted, until it was clear that the Queen held her in real affection.
While the country weathered the political and economic stresses of the banking crisis of 2008 (“Why did no one see it coming?” asked the Queen of the economists) and the change of government from that of Gordon Brown to David Cameron, the royal family remained settled in the public favour. A highlight came in 2011 with the wedding of the Queen’s grandson Prince William to Kate Middleton, a middle-class bride well-schooled in royal protocol. There was none of the ethereal fairytale element that Diana had generated, but a beautiful and well-behaved young woman marrying a sensible young husband and eventually producing what promised to be the ideal new royal family.
Gradually, the Queen lightened her load, passing some of the Sovereign’s duties to the Prince of Wales and a few to Prince William and his brother, Prince Harry. But she continued to lead such national and religious events as the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the Cenotaph. She had already given up taking part in the country sports of walking and shooting, but she still loved to hear about them, and nothing would make her give up riding or to persuade her to wear a safety helmet when she did so. Nor did she give up on her red boxes, or her weekly interviews with the Prime Minister of the day. She had, after all, been the most experienced head of Government since many world leaders were born.
The final years of her reign were not without challenges as great as any that she had already faced: the strain on her position during the protracted parliamentary drama over Brexit, with the unconstitutional proroguing of Parliament over which the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had to apologise to her; tensions within the Union, particularly in Scotland; the difficulties that followed the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and their departure for the United States; the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
alamyWith the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Irish War Memorial Garden in Dublin, May 2011
During the Covid pandemic, the Queen, who had said that she had to be “seen to be believed”, played a crucial part in offering hope, in a short video from Windsor Castle, broadcast on television and widely shared around the world on social media — “We will meet again,” she said, echoing Vera Lynn’s wartime hit — and setting an example in her observance of the same restrictions as everyone else. At her husband’s funeral in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 2021, held during lockdown, Elizabeth was seen, sitting alone in her pew, her head bowed. Her face was concealed on this occasion by the brim of her hat.
She spoke openly of the loss of Prince Philip in her last Christmas broadcast, and of the “one familiar laugh missing this year”. When she spoke of responsibility for the upkeep of Christmas family traditions, it was clear she was looking further when she said: “We see our own children and their families embrace the roles, traditions, and values that mean so much to us, as these are passed from one generation to the next, sometimes being updated for changing times. I see it in my own family and it is a source of great happiness.”
Over the years, she had grown more relaxed, preferring informal meetings to hidebound protocol; but her popularity and the reverence for her remained, as the celebrations of her Platinum Jubilee this June demonstrated. By then, she had become increasingly frail, and she was little seen in public. But, when she was seen, the delight at meeting people seemed greater than ever before.
Anyone who ever met her knew that she was different. When she came into a room, the atmosphere subtly changed. Was it the dedication to service which she had made so long ago in that girlish voice, or the anointing that she took so seriously at her Coronation? There was always something that marked her as extraordinarily special.
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26 September 2022
What am I living for? God
Sam Wells and Lucy Winkett begin the St Martin-in-the-Fields autumn lecture series in partnership with Church Times.
27 September 2022
Theology Slam Live Final
Watch the final in Leeds or access the livestream.
More events
The bond between monarch and subjects is more than symbolic, argues Paul Vallely
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