In 1969, the Queen allowed the BBC to make a documentary about her family life.
She died just months after her unprecedented platinum jubilee. They included the births of her four children, their marriages, the investiture of her heir, Charles, as the Prince of Wales in 1969, the deaths of her uncle the Duke of Windsor in 1972 and her mother aged 101 in 2002, as well as her own jubilees: silver in 1977, golden in 2002, diamond in 2012 and sapphire in 2017 (the first by any British monarch). Hers was a reign marked far more by private milestones and, later, by private traumas. The post-imperial grouping mattered to the Queen and how it will survive her death is unclear. But from 1957 on, when Ghana became independent, many of the “possessions” that the Queen had sworn to govern in her coronation oath became self-governing instead, while mostly remaining within the Commonwealth.
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This had begun under her father, when India became free in 1947. Another was the dispassionate care and affection, which often contrasted with the indifference of some politicians, that she displayed towards the nations of the United Kingdom, embodied in particular in her love of Scotland.Įven more long-lasting was her important formal part in the retreat from empire. One was her visit to Ireland in 2011, which played a pivotal part in the historic reconciliations of that time. The consequence of this generally deft approach is that her long reign was only rarely marked by anything that she herself did in the public sphere. In this, she provided an undeniable source of stability as the country underwent epochal changes at home and in the world during her lifetime. She managed to combine in her person the remote sacramental dimension of the British monarchy with a realistic acceptance that her standing rested on more secular foundations. She adapted, cautiously and pragmatically, to change. That never quite happened, and in retrospect the idea can be seen as a characteristic post-imperial conceit. In the early years of her reign there was heady talk of Britain entering a new Elizabethan age. She was crowned Queen in the first televised coronation in 1953. As monarch, her first prime minister was Winston Churchill, who had participated in a cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898, yet she had already been on the throne for 23 years before the current prime minister, her 15th, was even born. At 14, she lived through the existential threat to the nation that followed the fall of France.
At 10, she witnessed the abdication of her uncle that made her heir to the throne. She came into the world before all British adults had the vote. She died when Britain was a medium-sized northern European country with an uncertain future. She was born when Britain ruled a global empire of some 600 million people. The Queen’s life spanned the entire history of modern Britain.
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