Queen Elizabeth’s achievement was to adapt the monarchy to sweeping change without ever letting on what she was doing
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.
These precedents were much in the mind of the new Queen’s first prime minister, Winston Churchill, when he broadcast in February 1952 on the death of her father, King George VI. For Churchill was a product of the late 19th century, and the last authentically Victorian figure to occupy 10 Downing Street. As he ended his broadcast, he turned from eulogising the late king to acclaiming the new monarch, by linking the last great reign of a female sovereign with the one to come: “I,” he concluded, “whose youth was nurtured in the august, unchallenged, tranquil glow of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and the anthem ‘God save the Queen.’”
