There’s no better way to describe Queen Elizabeth II‘s life than as an incarnation of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s call to “Duty, Honor, Country — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.”
Elizabeth met that challenge in all 70 of her years as the British monarch and all 96 years of her life. This enduring life of duty must always be remembered alongside the luxury in which she lived it.
Elizabeth was crowned as queen in 1953 at 25, and her reign saw 15 different prime ministers. This list began with Winston Churchill and ended with Liz Truss, who took office at Downing Street only this week. The queen also met with 13 U.S. presidents, only excluding Lyndon Johnson. Memorable moments include her hosting of a London dinner for President John Kennedy, her horse ride with President Ronald Reagan, and her car ride for America’s first black president, Barack Obama, outside Windsor Castle. While the queen’s role in the life of the special relationship between Britain and the United States was always secondary to that of the presidents and prime ministers, she was always a very close personal friend of America. In this, her long life offered a highly symbolic physicality to the most important and enduring alliance of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The queen’s legacy will likely center on two key successes.
First, its sustaining of the royal family over a much-changed nation with much-changed expectations of what the royal family should be and look like. The extraordinary success of Elizabeth in this regard was her ability to maintain a presentation of kinship, decorum, stability, and sober distance. That latter point of distance bears note in terms of Elizabeth’s other major success: her ability to transcend politics. Whether it was the post-war collapse of Churchill’s government, the tumultuous economic and social challenges of the 1970s and 1980s, or the 1990s advent of “cool Britannia” liberalism, the queen always retained her credibility as an apolitical constitution of the British state. The only exception was the queen’s support for a continued British union between England, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. This additional note considering the not occasional political interventions of the queen’s son and successor, King Charles III, formerly Prince Charles. It matters that Britain’s democracy exists at once alongside and politically distinct from its monarch.
In October 1940, as Britain waged an existential struggle for control of its airspace against the Nazis, 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth addressed the many British children who had been forced to leave their families and take refuge outside the cities. “I feel that I am speaking to friends and companions. … Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your fathers and mothers.” But Elizabeth offered courage, “We know, every one of us, that in the end, all will be well, for God will care for us and give us victory and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”
Elizabeth was an unshakable rock for her nation and people, an inspiration and friend to many around the world. She leaves this world better and happier thanks to her long life of service.
