Nearly four years on from her 2022 death, Queen Elizabeth’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) has been updated, and one royal expert is calling the listing “mean-spirited.”
According to the Telegraph, roughly 229 entries were added to the DNB for public figures who died in 2022, including the late Queen. The new listing was added ahead of what would’ve been her 100th birthday later this month, and it claims that Queen Elizabeth “adapted slowly and not always enthusiastically” to the times during her historic 70-year reign.
“During the course of her reign, the United Kingdom ceased to be a great power in the world, and evolved into a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic society, and the country in which she died was very different from that in which she had been born,” the DNB biography reads. “To all this she adapted, slowly and not always enthusiastically, but on the whole wisely and well.”
“Although she made some mis-steps (particularly in relation to her family) she provided reassurance for a rapidly changing country, deftly fronted retreat and reinvention abroad, gradually adjusted the British monarchy to the post-Victorian and post-imperial world, and did all this without ever letting on in public that was what she was doing,” the entry continues.
In regards to the “mis-steps,” royal biographer Robert Hardman wrote in his new biography of the late Queen that she gave preferential treatment to her more “vulnerable” son, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. “As we approach the 100th birthday of Elizabeth II, that's obviously there on the relatively short list of things she got wrong,” Hardman said on the "Queens, Kings and Dastardly Things" podcast, adding, “I think she got a lot more right.”
The DNB entry concludes, “She had not been born to succeed, but by her example, her self-discipline, her public spiritedness, and her longevity, she did so in more ways than one, living out perhaps the most remarkable life of her times.”
“Whilst I wouldn’t expect the entry to be gushing, it comes across as rather mean-spirited and begrudging,” said Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty magazine (via the Telegraph). “There’s nothing inaccurate about it but, in my opinion, it could—and should—have been more upbeat.”
