Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: 1926–2022: A celebration of her life and reign

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They were Winston Churchill (1952-55); Anthony Eden (1955-57); Harold Macmillan (1957-63); Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64); Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-76); Edward Heath (1970-1974); James Callaghan (1976-79); Margaret Thatcher (1979-90); John Major (1990-97); Tony Blair (1997-2007); Gordon Brown (2007-2010); David Cameron (2010-16); Theresa May (2016-19); Boris Johnson (2019-22); and Liz Truss from 2022. The first four were aristocrats, either by birth or marriage; the remainder were of humbler origin (though Blair was educated at a Scottish public school; Cameron and Johnson at Eton). In fact, it presented him with an opportunity for Trollopian intrigue on a grand scale, and allowed him, effectively, to choose his successor while dressing up the procedure in what would soon come to be highly questionable constitutional practice. Elaborate inquiries carried out at his behest by senior colleagues, supported by statistics that have been the subject of controversy ever since, persuaded him that the foreign secretary, the 14th Earl of Home, was the party’s “preponderant first choice”. The Queen came to see him in hospital, where he read to her his conclusions and formally resigned office. In the last 70 years there has also been much discussion about the environment and concern regarding climate change. In 2021 it was the Queen who welcomed scientists and world leaders to the United Nations Climate Change Conference - or COP26 - held in the UK. Claiming an intimacy denied to her other prime ministers, he used the Queen’s name and beliefs in ways that strained convention. During the protracted struggle with Ian Smith, Wilson caused the Queen to write a letter to the Rhodesian prime minister in her own hand reminding him of his binding allegiance to the Crown. That was constitutionally permissible. But Wilson went further. He declared that his government’s policy reflected “the specific authority and approval of Her Majesty herself”. To reveal what purported to be the Queen’s personal opinions was dangerous, undermining as it did her political neutrality. The illusion of a Second Elizabethan Age seemed short-lived. Scots subjects resented that their Queen should be proclaimed Elizabeth II in a kingdom where no Elizabeth I had ever reigned, and blew up pillar-boxes bearing the unhistoric cipher. Even the loyal Scottish establishment gathered in St Giles’ Cathedral in all their finery to present her with the Honours of Scotland – Crown, Sceptre and Sword – were dismayed that she appeared in day clothes, a rare error of judgment by her English private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles.

From the moment of her accession to the throne, comparisons were made with her Tudor namesake; particularly in the assumption that the country’s fortunes were, as in 1558, at a low ebb and that its one hope lay in the character of the new Queen. But few could have dared to believe Richard Dimbleby’s declaration at the time of the Coronation – that “No more devoted or courageous person could carry on the monarchy, which is the lasting strength of Britain and the wonder and envy of a large part of the world” – would prove so accurate. Politically impartial and free from class-consciousness, she rapidly established a comfortable relationship with Wilson that continued throughout his years at No 10. The supposed Sassenach snub was barely redeemed by removing her handbag from the official painting of the ceremony that hangs in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Republicans called for an end to the monarchy: “a gold filling in the mouth of decay”, as the playwright John Osborne put it; radicals for a curb on royal expenditure; Tory reformers for a monarch less identified with aristocratic conventions and a hidebound court. In any case, the Queen’s acceptance of Macmillan as her sole source of advice need not have been the end of the matter. Had Butler refused to serve under Home, he might well have displaced him at No 10. But he chose not to fight and lost the day.

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Eden’s succession in April 1955 was the first of the three occasions on which the Queen was required to exercise her prerogative of choosing a new prime minister; and since Eden had long been Churchill’s unchallenged heir apparent, the least difficult. His premiership of less than two years is largely remembered for the Suez adventure that ended in humiliation. The extent of the Queen’s concern has never been revealed, nor whether at any stage of the preparations for the invasion of Egypt she counselled caution. It has been alleged that Lord Mountbatten, the then First Sea Lord, used his privileged access to the Palace to warn her of the perils of Eden’s policy. There is more solid evidence of a division of opinion among her three private secretaries. The senior, Sir Michael Adeane, approved of Eden’s enterprise; Sir Edward Ford and Sir Martin Charteris, both of whom had experience of the Middle East, were opposed to it. The Queen, happiest when at Windsor or her private residences of Sandringham and Balmoral, was not wedded to a life of luxury.

The Queen’s own secretariat, as small as it was efficient, continued to make household economies, but never enough to silence taunts of profligacy. Twenty years into the reign, a persistent Labour critic complained that the Queen Mother’s Civil List had just been raised by 35 per cent. He omitted to mention that during the same period his own parliamentary salary had more than quadrupled; or that a new car park for MPs at Westminster had cost more than twice the Queen’s then Civil List. In retrospect the notion seems as insubstantial as the tinsel finery of the Festival of Britain that in 1951 had parodied the solid commercial enterprise of the Great Exhibition a century earlier. The Queen inherited a threadbare economy and an empire in dissolution; and in 1956 the Suez adventure left Britain isolated and condemned, not least by her paymaster, the United States. When her father died in February 1952, Elizabeth—then 25 years old—became queen of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon (known today as Sri Lanka), as well as head of the Commonwealth. Elizabeth reigned as a constitutional monarch through major political changes such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, devolution in the United Kingdom, the decolonisation of Africa, and the United Kingdom's accession to the European Communities and withdrawal from the European Union. The number of her realms varied over time as territories gained independence and some realms became republics. As queen, Elizabeth was served by more than 170 prime ministers across her realms. Her many historic visits and meetings included state visits to China in 1986, to Russia in 1994, and to the Republic of Ireland in 2011, and meetings with five popes and fourteen US presidents. Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King GeorgeV. She was the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King GeorgeVI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother). Her father acceded to the throne in 1936 upon the abdication of his brother EdwardVIII, making the ten-year-old Princess Elizabeth the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In November 1947, she married Philip Mountbatten, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, and their marriage lasted 73 years until his death in 2021. They had four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward. The ageing matriarch, outraged at this attempt to supersede the name Windsor, established in perpetuity by her husband King George V in 1917, complained to the prime minister. Churchill, an unforgiving critic of Mountbatten’s then recent role in negotiating Indian independence, bristled at this new blow to imperial pride. After consulting the Cabinet he formally advised the Queen to put the matter beyond doubt with the following statement: “The Queen today declared in Council her Will and Pleasure that She and Her Children shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that Her descendants other than female descendants who marry and their descendants shall bear the name of Windsor.”

1981 - The Queen's eldest son, Charles, Prince ofWales marries Lady Diana Spencer

Queen Elizabeth II was the elder daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In 1947 she married Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, who was created Duke of Edinburgh at the time of their marriage; King Charles III is the eldest of their four children. She was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 and celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 2002; her 90th birthday in 2016; her Platinum Wedding anniversary in 2017; and her Diamond and Platinum Jubilees in 2012 and 2022 respectively. Compared with her immediate predecessors, the Queen used her influence sparingly and without either personal or political bias: Queen Victoria had been relentless in obstructing Liberal measures and scarcely less alert when the Tories were in office; King Edward VII was an irascible inquisitor on military and diplomatic questions; King George V tireless in keeping ministers of all parties on their toes, even in matters of dress and deportment. King George VI, overshadowed throughout the Second World War by Winston Churchill, was left scarcely any exercise of the prerogative except in the habitual royal playground of uniforms, medals and decorations; nor, when a Labour administration took office in 1945, could he always conceal the prejudices of a Tory country gentleman. At the beginning of 2022, however, when Prince Andrew looked likely to be called upon to justify himself in the American courts, the Queen removed his regiments and patronages, and instructed that he no longer use his “HRH”. Shortly afterwards he settled the civil law suit against him. In any case, the Queen had neither the time nor the interfering temperament to act as peacemaker. She could but prescribe patience and understanding: the aspirin, as it were, of marital guidance. It was not enough. The first of her children to marry was Princess Anne, later to become the Princess Royal, a woman of strong character who as president of Save the Children Fund earned acclaim for her tours of inspection in the poorer parts of Africa and Asia. She married in 1973 a fellow equestrian, the Olympic gold medallist Captain Mark Phillips, to whom she bore a son and a daughter. Some of his bride’s family affected not to find him as clever as themselves, though he became articulate on any matter equestrian. They were divorced without acrimony in 1992, when the Princess married Captain (now Vice-Admiral Sir) Timothy Laurence RN, a former equerry to the Queen. In the fashion of the day, the nation rejoiced at the royal birth. But it never doubted that in one way or another, Princess Elizabeth would be spared the gilded treadmill of a monarch. It was an illusion that, at least for the first 10 years of her life, protected her from many cares.

But there were complaints that in preferring Home to Butler, who was thought to enjoy wider support in the constituencies, Macmillan’s advice to the Queen had been tainted by personal animus. As a result, the argument continued, the Queen had selected as prime minister a party leader less well qualified than Butler to win the next general election. One respected historian of the Left, Ben Pimlott, wrote in his life of the Queen (1996) that “it was the biggest political misjudgment of her reign”.It did not escape notice that Churchill had championed King Edward VIII’s marriage to Mrs Simpson in 1936 or that Eden himself had divorced and remarried, as had other members of both Cabinets. The Queen was unable (and perhaps unwilling) to shield her sister from constitutional pressures. Such was the custom of the day. Nearly 40 years later, her only daughter was to divorce and remarry, leaving scarcely a ripple – and more marital splits would follow. Sadly, the bride proved unable to fit into royal life, despite the Queen giving the couple important roles in the Commonwealth, to which both had been independently drawn. By 2019, the pair had departed for Canada, soon decamping to Los Angeles, with their new-born child, to renounce their roles as working members of the Royal family and set themselves up independently.