Elizabeth II’s job as queen was imposed on her by an ancient constitution that required no qualification other than that she exist.
Having been appointed, and whatever her private thoughts, she performed her role over an extraordinarily long reign in near-faultless manner, leaving scant ammunition for personal attack from the fiercest opponents of hereditary principle.
As Britain hurtled through times of astonishing societal change, she faced many challenges in keeping the monarchy apace – and yet she succeeded in remaining a force for national cohesion. A constant: familiar in brightly coloured coat, brimmed hat and handbag, she glad-handed her way through “walkabouts”, garden parties, ship launches, plaque unveilings, tree plantings, building inaugurations – the bread and butter of her engagements diary – with an inscrutable smile in place.
Becoming queen at such a young age meant the world knew little of her personality and views before her accession, and she continued to reveal little thereafter. She never uttered a controversial opinion in public, though supporters and critics would differ over whether this was simply because she held none, or whether she was a master of the art of political neutrality.
When caught in a maelstrom, it was most likely she had been thrust there by a lack of precedent in the protocol on which her life was solidly predicated, or wrong-footed by politicians or the antics of the younger royals.
She once said: “Of course, in this existence, the job and the life go together – you can’t really divide it up.” To some extent the person and position were one and the same. Yet not entirely. She kept much back. Only those closest knew Elizabeth the wife, mother, grandmother and excellent mimic. Though the masses caught occasional glimpses of the private woman, she remained largely an enigma, and will do so until the diaries, which in royal tradition she wrote daily, are made public.
Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born third in line to the throne on 21 April 1926, at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, her maternal grandparents’ London home, 12 days before the general strike. Three months previously, John Logie Baird had given his first public demonstration of television, which would, as high-speed travel and the internet did later, transform the world during her lifetime.
When her uncle David, then Edward VIII, abdicated over his determination to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, destiny cast Elizabeth as heir presumptive at the age of 10. For the obedient, sensible princess, who neatly lined up her toy ponies outside the nursery door each night, and who was being home-schooled for an aristocratic life as a minor royal, it was a traumatic turn of events. She could, her grandmother Lady Strathmore said later, be seen at night “ardently praying for a brother”. None came.
Her stammering, introvert father, George VI, died prematurely in 1952, when she was 25, a young wife and mother of two, who had hoped for many more years between herself and the crown.
In the Elizabeth R documentary for the BBC, marking the 40th anniversary of her accession, she explained: “In a way, I didn’t have an apprenticeship. My father died much too young. It was all a very sudden kind of taking on and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something one has got used to doing and accepting that here you are and that is your fate, because I think continuity is very important. It’s a job for life.”
It was a succinct summary of her matter-of-fact attitude towards her lot.
The coronation in 1953 brought tens of thousands of people to the Mall. In unseasonably cold June drizzle and amid a blizzard of commemorative kitsch, the dazzling young queen was crowned with her handsome consort, Prince Philip, at her side. The public adoration and global fascination she attracted in those early years was of a level unmatched until Lady Diana Spencer joined the family firm 30 years later. A third of her subjects believed her to have been chosen by God. Deference was the order of the day.
Philip was at her side for 73 years. She was bereft at the loss of her lifelong companion after he died in his sleep at the age of 99 in April 2021. His death, during the Covid pandemic, led to her sitting alone and bereaved in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, during the poignant funeral, hugely scaled down because of coronavirus restrictions. The two had spent the last months of his life together in lockdown, shielding at Windsor because of their vulnerability to the virus due to their advanced years.
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Though duty and diligence were her own watchwords, there were occasions when Elizabeth found herself on the back foot despite her best endeavours. Her nadir, perhaps, was 1992, described by the Queen herself as her “annus horribilis”, a year when a scandal-weary public questioned whether misbehaving royals were deserving of their tax-free status and taxpayer-funded lifestyle. Dissent was fuelled by newspapers that had long ditched deference in favour of circulation-boosting headlines. The frenzy over the state of the marriages of the Prince of Wales and Duke of York was in full spate.
The Yorks separated, Princess Anne divorced, Andrew Morton published his disquieting Diana: Her True Story, and embarrassing taped calls – one involving Diana, the other between Charles and his then lover, Camilla Parker Bowles – found their way into the tabloids.
When part of Windsor Castle then burned down and a disconsolate Queen stood watching in a drab raincoat, a rare tear glistening, there was an outpouring of sympathy. It was swiftly surpassed by outrage when the government suggested taxpayers pick up the repair bill.
The speech she delivered at Guildhall at the end of that year was remarkable and unprecedented in tone. Buffeted and bewildered, she made a candid, open appeal for understanding. “No institution – City, monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty, not to mention those who don’t.” Most people tried to do the best job they could, she added in a thinly veiled personal plea. “I dare say that history will take a slightly more moderate view than that of some contemporary commentators.” She was, undoubtedly, wounded.
Within the month, it was announced Charles and Diana would separate, the Queen and Charles would pay tax on their private incomes, the civil list would be axed for the extended royals, and she would open Buckingham Palace to the public to pay for the Windsor repairs. It was a dramatic low point that highlighted the irreversible shift in the relationship between subjects and sovereign. So long as royal lives were irreproachable, some argument for privacy could be made. Once this ceased to be the case, the rules changed. Unwelcome publicity was something she would have to endure.
As best befits a constitutional monarchy, Elizabeth II appeared largely to be a passive queen, proving to be a more than competent mouthpiece for her governments in delivering the often stilted words of politicians or starched-shirt courtier advisers.
As a mother, too, she displayed some passive tendencies, tending to leave her children to their own business. She was said to immerse herself in her red boxes, containing official government correspondence, rather than face family rows and other emotional dramas.
Nonetheless, her family were the cause of some of the more turbulent times of her reign. When, in 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped back as senior working royals and decamped to the US to seek freedom and the ability to earn their own money, it was the beginning of a difficult chapter for the monarchy.
Harry and Meghan gave a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, while Philip was in hospital, in which they accused an unnamed member of the royal family of racism towards their son Archie before he was born, and the institution of failing to help the suicidal duchess.
In the aftermath of the interview, the Queen issued a carefully worded statement, saying that “while some recollections may vary”, the issues raised would be taken “very seriously” but dealt with privately as a family.
At the same time the Duke of York was weathering a storm that also threatened the institution. Forced to step back from public duties in November 2019 after a “car crash” television interview over his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he faced mounting pressure to answer FBI questions.
Andrew faced allegations from Virginia Giuffre, which he strenuously denied, that he had had sex with her when she was 17 and had been trafficked by Epstein. As his friend Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted at trial in the US over charges she recruited girls for Epstein, Giuffre filed a civil suit against the duke seeking unspecified damages at a federal court in New York.
The civil lawsuit was settled out of court in February 2022, with the duke paying an undisclosed sum.
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Throughout her reign the Queen sometimes appeared remote and out of touch. “Aberfan: she got that wrong and she knows it,” her former private secretary Sir Martin Charteris once said of her six-day delay in visiting the scene of the 1966 south Wales pit disaster in which 116 children and 28 adults died. She had feared her presence would detract from those grieving.
In the aftermath of Diana’s death, in 1997, as the country seemed convulsed in mass hysteria and headlines shrieked “Show us you care”, she remained at Balmoral, her Scottish estate, comforting the young princes, William and Harry, and convinced, arguably correctly, that the immediate need for a grandmother was greater than that for a queen.
Despite nervous palace officials sniffing revolution in the air, she averted any potential crisis by later paying tribute “as your Queen and as a grandmother” to Diana in a televised address to the nation and, eventually, breaking protocol to fly the union flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace.
Public tears were rare, though her eyes welled when the beloved royal yacht Britannia was decommissioned in December 1997, and at a service for 9/11 bombing victims in 2001. Tears were visible too when, just months after the death of her mother, she took her role at the opening of the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey in 2002.
Her reluctance to emote in public, a generational as well as genetic trait, was often ascribed to her being unsentimental and aloof. It was a struggle to always get it right, even when trying.
Early on, during her tour of Australia in 1954, officials first noted “the smiling problem”, picking up on press reports that she looked quite glum. “I’ve got the kind of face that, if I’m not smiling I look cross, but I’m not cross,” she said in exasperation to one concerned aide, her jaw aching from two solid hours of grinning.
She kept on smiling, or trying to, and waving. And wearing hats, though she thought they made her “look like a sheep”. Friends said she “didn’t give a fig” what she wore, and had little interest in clothes, putting on whatever her dresser thought suitable for the job in hand: shimmering gown and diamond tiara for the banquet, hat and handbag for the luncheon. She possessed, apparently, the unique skill of being able to position a tiara on her head perfectly without a mirror. Even in her later years, she retained regal glamour.
But these were the accoutrements of office. A countrywoman at heart, she was happiest on horseback or in a tweed skirt, sturdy shoes and headscarf, walking her corgis, wringing wounded pheasants’ necks, or tramping the highland moors at Balmoral. She was a different queen at her Scottish estate, with friends describing her “rushing around in tatty clothes, laughing, joking, joining in, singing dirty songs”.
Here she and Philip, with whom she had fallen in love at 13 and whom she described as her “strength and stay” throughout their marriage, had precious time with their young family away from the pressures of office.
Visitors didn’t always share her enthusiasm for Balmoral Castle. It was draughty, and a little threadbare and down at heel in parts. But such details fascinated the public: a queen who stored cereal in Tupperware, used a two-bar electric fire for heating, and kept a Big Mouth Billy Bass, a battery-operated fish, on top of her piano, seemed less remote, despite being woken each morning by bagpipes.
Margaret Thatcher, when prime minister, dreaded her mandatory summer Scottish sojourn, unable to relax during informal barbecues on windswept hillsides – Philip on sausages, Queen on salad, Charles mixing dressing. Even worse were the after-dinner charades, a fact the Queen later acknowledged during a dinner with six of her former prime ministers when she joked about “the party games which some of you have so nobly endured at Balmoral”.
Such details served to flesh out a woman about whom, personally, there was a dearth of knowledge. That is why the Sunday Times’s “Thatcher row” story, in 1986, caused such a sensation. Headlined “Queen dismayed by uncaring Thatcher”, the report claimed she was actually a bit of a leftie and worried about Thatcher’s refusal to impose tough sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Furthermore, Her Majesty was also reported to be worried about race relations, inner-city decay and damage caused to the social fabric of the nation by the miners’ strike.
It was explosive, and it was denied. A hurried palace inquiry determined her then press secretary, Michael Shea, had spoken without royal assent to a Sunday Times reporter and there had been “misunderstandings” in questions put and answers given. Neil Kinnock, the opposition leader, refusing to capitalise on political gold, put it down to “loose-lipped courtiers and wide-eared reporters”.
Whatever its truth, or otherwise, the brouhaha cast into sharp relief the different perspective she and her governments often shared over the Commonwealth.
With the end of the empire her father had inherited, her personal commitment to the Commonwealth undoubtedly helped to defuse some of the worst of the post-colonial fallout.
She was queen of 16 Commonwealth realms, latterly 15, including the UK, and an emollient head of the loose 54-nation Commonwealth association that rose from the empire’s ashes. She regarded its success as among her greatest achievements, and pledged herself to it time and again.
As a political ingenue, she grew up alongside Commonwealth leaders such as Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Indira Gandhi of India and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Constitutionally, Buckingham Palace did not accept the right of a British government to enforce a view of the Commonwealth on her, and it would have been difficult for them to do so. With leaders earnestly seeking her ear on private woes, she was, in Philip’s words, the “Commonwealth psychotherapist”.
As a result, she sometimes found herself thrust into difficult situations. When Ian Smith made his unilateral declaration of independence – for white minority rule in southern Rhodesia, as it then was – she agreed with the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson’s request that there be no question of her accepting the role of head of state of a rebel regime. But the personal message she sent, entreating Smith to find a compromise, would be misinterpreted in his fight for endorsement, raising questions over whether she should have even written it.
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The Commonwealth role she had carved out must often have tested her neutrality. Britain’s common market bid fuelled fears of a weaker trading position for Commonwealth countries with Britain. The 1956 Suez crisis saw the majority of Commonwealth nations rally against Britain in the United Nations. There were other examples, and hers was a difficult role to perform, listening to the woes of leaders at the biennial Commonwealth heads of government meetings she attended.
Eventually, given her longevity, her experience in world affairs would eclipse that of any of her prime ministers. Details of their weekly audiences were secret, but most must have drawn on her wealth of experience.
Sometimes prime ministers placed her in tricky situations, too. Not least Harold Macmillan. As the postwar Conservative party had no formal rules for electing a leader, she had a royal prerogative and constitutional right to ask whomever she wished to form a Conservative government.
Sir Anthony Eden’s resignation in 1957 forced her to choose between Rab Butler or Harold Macmillan. The latter received the most votes. But, in 1963, she found herself unwittingly sucked into an ugly party squabble when an ailing Macmillan, recently resigned as prime minister, convinced her from his hospital bed to choose Alec Douglas-Home as his successor instead of Butler, his deputy.
Feeling obliged to take Macmillan’s advice, she made, according to her biographer, the historian Ben Pimlott, “the biggest political misjudgment of her reign”. It led the Conservatives to follow Labour’s example and establish a selection process so that the Queen would never be placed in such an awkward position again.
Personally, aides indicated at the time, Lord Home was much more her cup of tea than Butler would have been, and the two enjoyed chatting about dogs, shooting and Scottish estates. Undoubtedly, she had her favourite prime ministers. Wilson was a huge hit. Edward Heath she found a bit tricky. And while she and Thatcher could not be said to have enjoyed a warm relationship, it was respectful, and the Queen went to her 2013 ceremonial funeral as a personal tribute, the first funeral of a former prime minister she had attended since Sir Winston Churchill’s in 1965.
As the nation’s figurehead, it was her job to do its bidding, by and large. And she was often called on to perform gestures of reconciliation. As such, she visited Germany in 1965, signalling the end of its post-war pariah status and, in 2011, became the first British monarch in a century to visit the Republic of Ireland.
On occasion, however, such goodwill visits would be conducted against a highly personal backdrop. With glasnost, perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government packed her off to visit Russia in 1994. She obliged, putting to the back of her mind the grisly end her Romanov relations had met at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Philip, a direct descendant, had even given a DNA sample to prove skeletons dug from a pit in eastern Russia in 1991 were those of the murdered imperial family.
In 2012, she was required to pitch up in Belfast and shake hands with Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, putting aside the personal tragedy of the 1979 IRA assassination of “Uncle Dickie”, Lord Mountbatten, her distant cousin and Philip’s uncle. If it was an uncomfortable encounter, the warm smile and firm handshake did not betray it as such.
When the Scottish independence referendum took place in 2014, the Queen’s traditional neutrality came into question. During the referendum campaign, she was overheard telling a member of the public that she hoped voters would think carefully about the future. And after the prime minister, David Cameron, phoned her to say Scotland had voted no, he was caught on camera saying the Queen had “purred down the line”, suggesting she was pleased with the result. For his part, Cameron later expressed regret and said he would apologise to the Queen after breaching the convention that the prime minister never speaks about his conversations with the monarch.
Royal tours tested her powers of diplomacy in different ways. Possessed of a relatively unsophisticated palate – she enjoyed dining on lamb, roast beef, mutton, grouse or salmon, preceded by one or two stiff martinis, and accompanied by Malvern mineral water, not wine – she balked not one jot when served sea slug at a state banquet in China.
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It was the sort of thing she would have later joked about, in private, to friends and family. Those close to her attested to a keen sense of humour and eye for the absurd. She once described to Noël Coward, the playwright, the solemn moment during Charles’s 1969 investiture as Prince of Wales, when she placed the coronet on top of his head. Both she and Charles, she said, “were struggling not to giggle because at the dress rehearsal the crown was too big and extinguished him like a candle-snuffer”.
She was quite unflappable. When Michael Fagan managed to break into her Buckingham Palace bedroom while she slept in 1982, she calmly called the palace switchboard twice to alert security, which took some time coming. Later, according to Pimlott, she said of the unwelcome encounter to a friend: “He just talked the usual sort of bilge that people talk to me on walkabout. I can handle that.”
Her sense of comic timing was evident in the 1992 documentary Elizabeth R. Speaking to an aide about the Polish president Lech Walesa’s state visit to Windsor, she remarked: “He knows only two English words [pause] … They are quite interesting words.”
These were the sort of tidbits she would share with her mother, until her death in 2002. Coming, as it did, only eight weeks after the passing of her sister, Princess Margaret, it cast a shadow over her golden jubilee celebrations. The two queens were close and enjoyed a supportive relationship.
The Queen’s annual Christmas broadcast, which she wrote herself, revealed a woman of unshakable faith. She took very seriously her position as head of the Church of England, even if it did require her deftly to sidestep Charles’s civil marriage to Parker Bowles by absenting herself from the register office part of the ceremony.
And, if she required validation that she had performed her duties well, she would have found it in the mass outpourings of affection demonstrated on her silver, golden and diamond jubilees, amply testifying to the special place she managed to hold in the nation’s heart.
She was, she said, humbled by this. But she always insisted she could never have done it alone.
During her 80th birthday celebrations, at a lunch for those born on the same day as her, she appeared emotional as she spoke of the support she had received over the years. “I doubt whether any of us would say the last 80 years has been plain sailing. But we can give thanks for our health and happiness, the support we receive from our families and friends, some wonderful memories and the excitement each new day brings.”
Her 90th birthday, she declared on a walkabout in Windsor to mark the occasion, was “a lovely day”. At Windsor’s Guildhall, she met other nonagenarians, telling them: “You were all born in a lovely vintage year.”
She wore her years lightly, despite being forced to take a brief time out from official visits in late 2021 when doctors advised her to rest.And in 2022, the public saw less of her in person due to mobility issues. Her feelings on her age were, perhaps, best summed up when she politely declined the Oldie of the Year award, aged 95. Her private office wrote: “Her Majesty believes you are as old as you feel, as such the Queen does not believe she meets the relevant criteria to be able to accept, and hopes you will find a more worthy recipient.”
