When the future Queen Elizabeth II was born in 1926, her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, had been dead for scarcely a quarter of a century, and it was less than 30 years since the spectacle and splendour of her diamond jubilee. Viewed from the vantage point of 1897 or 1901, the long years of Victoria’s reign had given the British much to feel proud of and be grateful for: constitutional stability, democratic progress and increased prosperity at home, and the extraordinary expansion of the greatest empire that the world had ever known. Small wonder, then, that Queen Victoria gave her name to her age – an age in which everything about Britain and its dominions had seemed to be getting bigger and better and greater and grander.
