The sheer span of Elizabeth II’s reign and the enormous changes that happened during it defy easy descriptions
When Elizabeth II came to the throne, in 1952, charming country houses that would now be worth several million could be picked up for under £10,000. Sweets, tea, butter, margarine and meat were among the foods still rationed. Only a small minority had fridges, washing machines or telephones. Outside toilets were common, cars aspirational, televisions a novelty item, central heating barely a rumour. Outside, the cities were smoky from the ubiquitous coal fires. Inside, houses were smoky because most adults’ lips held cigarettes.
Children began playing unsupervised shortly after they could walk. Crime rates were low, and front doors often unlocked. Hangings were common enough to be hardly worth reporting except in the most sensational cases. National service for young men was hard to avoid, and some conscripts were sent to fight and die in Korea.
Women mostly stayed at home and, the monarch excepted, almost never held prominent positions. Gay people were persecuted, more so in the early 1950s than before. Many Britons would never have seen a non-white face. The country was still largely industrial. And it still had an empire, though not the resources to support it.
Every one of those facts, except the last seven words, changed in the course of Elizabeth II’s reign. Never had Britain altered so much under the rule of a single monarch. Perhaps no other country has either. The swirl and churn around her (not least in her own family) made the Queen’s constancy all the more remarkable. “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age,” said Sherlock Holmes in His Last Bow. Elizabeth II played that role in our own times.
And yet, she did not manage to stamp her personality on the era. The word “Elizabethan” in 2022 still conjures up images of Sir Francis Drake playing bowls as the Armada came in, Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cloak down in a puddle and Miranda Richardson prancing around in Blackadder.
Churchill, in a majestic prime ministerial radio address the day after Elizabeth II became queen, invoked “the grandeur and genius of the Elizabethan age”, and the concept of “new Elizabethans” did take hold for a while. A plane and a new fast train (less than seven hours from King’s Cross to Edinburgh) were both named the Elizabethan. And public figures took to hectoring people on the need to work harder and reproduce the spirit of Good Queen Bess’s time. The historian Sir Michael Howard later reflected that it was a good analogy: “Once again we were, as we had been then, a power of the second rank, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.”
But it did not stick. The last eponymous age was Queen Victoria’s reign. “Victorian” instantly evokes the image of her times, or at least their perception as “prudish, strict; old-fashioned, outdated”, (Oxford English Dictionary). It is even used in the US, particularly to describe houses.
Victoria spent 63 years on the throne, and change in that period was vast. When she became queen, most travel involved horses, and only a couple of railways had been built. By the time of her death, the first motor cars were on the roads and the Wright brothers were well on their way to inventing the aeroplane. But societal attitudes and the lives of the people were far more static than they would become under her great-great granddaughter.
Perhaps it is because the second Elizabethan age has seen such an extraordinary pace of change that trying to encompass it with a single adjective is futile. It is more convenient to split it into decades, with images that are evocative (even if not necessarily accurate). The 50s are dull and conformist, the 60s an age of sex and drugs and rock‘n’roll, the 70s riddled with contentiousness and the 80s as Thatcherism, for better or worse (delete to taste), and so on.
Whereas Victoria could be perceived as embodying her own era, certainly in her sad and sullen widowhood, Elizabeth II stood in apposition (but not opposition) to hers. And maybe that is the key to her success as a monarch. In a country whose politics became increasingly fractious and bitter, and a nation often delusional about its place in the world, she remained solid and unchanging, a lighthouse on a rocky shore sending out a platitudinous message of decency, kindness and a little bit of God. And if she ever had been faced with a genuine political crisis that would have required her intervention as the referee of last resort, her instinct for fairness would have almost certainly led her to the right answer. Imagine if Margaret, her thoroughly modern flibbertigibbet of a sister, had ascended the throne, and think of how different things may have been.
Part of her impartiality, I am inclined to think, owed not only to her early accession at the age of 25, but to the rather meagre education she had received before then. Unlike King Charles III, she had no time to acquire the kind of ideas that might feed controversy. Charles now has to unlearn much of what he knows. It is far better, perhaps, not to acquire views in the first place.
Charles, aged 73, is likely to have a relatively brief reign: although that worked for Edward VII, who only reigned for nine, and still managed to have his own evocative era. “Edwardian” had a certain elegance – a chimerical idyll before the cannon fire took over. Unfortunately, Charles is not a very adjectival name. Caroline, Carolean and Carline have been suggested. They seem unlikely to catch on.
Maybe his reign is going to be characterised by this decade. Judging by its performance so far, we will need to reach for one of the King’s favourite adjectives, most recently applied to his opinion – when he was still allowed to have one – on the plan to airlift refugees to Rwanda: the Appalling era.
Matthew Engel’s book The Reign – Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Part 1: The Way It Was, 1952-1979, will be published next month
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com