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To many people today, monarchies appear as something antiquated, fairytale-like, at best constantly entertaining. What an important unifying and symbolic function monarchs can have, and sometimes even must have, for a nation is generally gladly overlooked. This is less true of the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. But it is certainly true of Spain, it is true of Belgium and, above all, it is true of Britain. No one in our lifetime has embodied this better than the Queen of England, Scotland and Wales Elizabeth the Second.
However the crown fell on her head at a young age, Elizabeth II wore it from then on and until her death in full awareness of her duties and always with dignity. Her special charm may have been that, at least in public, she never allowed herself to be bent by any adversity, by any misfortune, or by any impropriety. She was the queen par excellence, the standard, the model and the symbol for a whole nation and for several generations.
One hardly thinks about the high price she personally had to pay for this task in her long life. Without the chance of a longer young life at the side of her omnipresent husband Philip, to whom she was married for over 73 years until his death in April 2021, she ascended the throne at the age of only 26 after the sudden death of her father King George VI and from then on had to be Queen first and foremost. Fulfilling this difficult task with dignity every day anew must have cost her an unimaginable amount of self-control and iron discipline.
The timing did not make it easy for her. Of the children, the boys in particular have repeatedly been bitter disappointments for her. Only her daughter Anne behaves according to her status. The more than one hundred years of life of her mother (Queen Mum) Elizabeth Angela Bowes-Lyon certainly contributed to the preservation of a long-gone 19th century notion of monarchical rule until her death. So, in the end, Queen Elizabeth could not really modernise the royal house of the Windsors, or Mountbatten-Windsors.
Queen Elizabeth II has seen a total of 15 prime ministers come and go. Among them were pretentious ones such as Winston Churchill, who delayed her coronation by a year; failed ones such as Clement Attlee (1945-1951), John Major (1990-1997), Gordon Brown (2007-2010), Theresa May (2016-2019) and most recently, until two days before her death, Boris Johnson (2019-2022); and successful ones such as Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and Tony Blair (1997-2007). Whoever ruled the country politically Queen Elizabeth stayed and held fast to her core beliefs. This achievement should not be underestimated, for Britain is anything but a united motherland.
It is already a historical oddity. Two queens Elizabeth respectively mark the rise and fall of English and later British rule. Few know that Elizabeth I, always politically pressed to the utmost, after the successful piracies of her minions Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake raised enough capital, it was she who conceded and legitimised the beginnings of the East Indies business. This once gave rise to the British Empire, a nostalgia of which Brexiteers still dream so fondly today. For Elizabeth II, all that remained was to accompany, bit by bit and piece by piece, the demise of what was once British world domination. In her era, Britain shrank back to what it once was, a barren country on the extreme western edge of Europe. Not even a few nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers help. It was Queen Elizabeth II's special work to make this truth a little more comfortable for her countrymen. She was the very staple of the United Kingdom, the bearer of the crowns of England and Scotland. As such she will be remembered forever.
Picture credits: Queen Elizabeth II
Source: google, merkur.de
