A monarch like no other, how will history remember Queen Elizabeth II?

By MICHAEL FRY
Published on Sunday 5 February 2012 00:00

EXACTLY 60 years since she ascended the throne, Michael Fry assesses how Queen Elizabeth II’s reign will be regarded by history

SIXTY years and still going strong… Queen Elizabeth II, with her robust health and unflagging devotion to duty, is well on course to become in 2015 the longest reigning British monarch. In that year she will surpass her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who sat on the throne from 1837 to 1901, and leave far behind her namesake, Elizabeth I of England, who did so from 1558 to 1603.

In the recent debate on the royal succession, and whether sons should lose their prior right to the crown over daughters, it was argued that women have on the whole made a better fist of monarchy than men. Entire eras of history take their name from the reigning queen – the Victorian age most obviously, when Britannia ruled the waves, but also, further back, the Elizabethan age, the period of England’s great cultural flowering and defiance of foreign foes.

At the time Elizabeth came to the throne in 1952, her first prime minister, Winston Churchill, pushed the idea that a new Elizabethan age was dawning. Britain had emerged from the Second World War victorious but exhausted: ruins, rationing, reconstruction defined a grey reality. How about bringing back some colour and romance to get the nation on the move and in the mood again for valiant deeds? So we had the Festival of Britain, and the Coronation, conveniently accompanied by news of the conquest of Everest, and Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana (which the Queen went to see but did not like).

Before long the whole idea turned flat, if not sour. The road to recovery was too gruelling, and anyway Britain never did win back its lost glory. Its achievement was rather to reconcile itself to relative decline without tearing itself apart, like imperial powers of the past. If future historians do come to call this the second Elizabethan age, then it will be in counterpoint to the first.

In important ways the current Queen Elizabeth mirrors the age. The monarch no longer tries to take any open part in politics, and it may be she was the one who finally let go of that historic role. Her grandfather, King George V, had openly promoted the formation of the National Government in 1931. She, faced with a miners’ strike and a hung parliament in 1974, made clear this was a mess into which she would not step, something the politicians had to sort out for themselves. They did it not very well, and the nation suffered. But the Queen stayed above the fray.

She had from the start seen herself as a different sort of role model.

Members of the House of Windsor have never been strangers to messy personal lives, and when she came to the throne she hoped to put that right. She held strong Christian values. With her dashing consort Prince Philip, the nation could look up to an ideal young couple and their lovely children. The whole Royal Family worked hard at public duties and patronage of charities. They led lives of almost obsessive regularity: summer at Balmoral, Christmas at Sandringham, otherwise Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, a relentless round punctuated by no less relentless tours to the Commonwealth and reliable foreign allies.

But that was the way the Queen wanted things. She seeks security in habit. It suits her that the seasons impose their different but regular settings and activities, and that the rituals of the state carry on as ever. Her personal looks matured and at length aged, but the conscious image has always been much the same: the safe styles made conspicuous (for the crowds) by glaring colours, the sturdy shoes, the hats and jewels, the handbag, worn everywhere from swinging London to the Canadian prairies or the Australian outback. In the past, some royals have been hell-raisers. In her reign the family was to set an example, to come down from on high and lead a blameless existence, bourgeois rather than boorish in the old aristocratic manner.

In reality the Royal Family, so far from setting British society an example, let British society set an example to it. We all turned from Victorian values to become permissive and cool. So, hesitantly, did they. The royal touchstone became divorce. It is bizarre to recall that in 1955 Princess Margaret was in effect forbidden to marry Captain Peter Townsend because he had been married before and been divorced – a reading of Anglican canon law which even then seemed extreme. Great misery it caused her, yet what she called her “duty to the Commonwealth” (for which read the pressure of her sister and mother) made her renounce her love. Today, of the Queen’s four children, three have been divorced, and none too discreetly either.

Historians will surely come to see the drama of Princess Diana as the turning point of the reign, not so much in the nation’s history (which in the 60 years has gone through several turning points) as in the history of the royal house. The People’s Princess knew at first hand what a charade the Windsors’ conventional morality had degenerated into, in a nation anyway committed to anything but. Sweet but vengeful, she got her own back by blowing the charade sky high.

There is no need to accuse the Queen herself of hypocrisy. But in the depth of her commitment to the values she brought to the monarchy, in her preference for carrying on in tried and trusted ways, in her resulting distance from decades of social change, she at last reached a point where her experiences and convictions failed her. That point arrived the night of 31 August, 1997, when the French ambassador phoned Balmoral to say Diana lay dead in Paris.

We have a long wait until the royal archives are opened and we can trace just what happened in the fraught days following. My guess would be that Stephen Frears’ film The Queen gets quite close to the truth. It makes Tony Blair the moving force. But the heroine, the character of moral grandeur, is Elizabeth. It is to her that he has to bring home how untenable her position has become, how the very monarchy might be putting itself at risk. She needs to see this, and to change. Despite the cost, that is what she does.

Exactly what the monarchy has changed into is harder to say. Even now, some things carry on as before. The Queen’s devotion to duty is starting to look almost incredible. In her eighties, two decades after most of us have put our feet up for good, she wades her way through an unending list of public engagements, always on show, always interested, never flagging, never failing.

But there have been subtle alterations. The monarchy no longer pretends to offer us moral lessons – unless the dogged determination to do what one has to do is itself a moral lesson. Other alterations have been less subtle. In these hard times, the nation wants to know that the cost of the royal family is worth it. Now the Queen has to tell us her income and how she spends the money. She also needs to pay taxes. Much of the mystery, thought so vital in the 19th century by the constitutional authority Walter Bagehot, has dissipated. But, brought down to earth, the Queen may now be more in touch with a British society always in flux.

The Queen is certainly in some ways more far-sighted than she has been given credit for. The Commonwealth is important to her, for example: she was out in the Commonwealth, at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya, on 6 February, 1952, when she heard the news of her father’s death and her own accession to the throne. She has always taken her role as head of the Commonwealth seriously, more seriously than her prime ministers have. That makes it easier to be head of state in a multicultural nation. Today it might help to reopen prospects we had forgotten or neglected too.

While the Queen has a lot to say about the Commonwealth, she seldom mentions Europe. The European Union faces an even deeper crisis than Britain, but Britain is now semi- detached from it, after rejecting its consensus on solutions. We might conceivably come to the broader view that we took the wrong decision in 1973 when we joined the Common Market. Any detached observer would surely not hesitate if asked to choose between closer connections with bankrupt Greece and Portugal or with booming India and Singapore. Britain could still look out again to the countries of other continents on which we turned our backs 40 years ago. We have the Queen to thank for keeping the Commonwealth’s links in good repair.

In the matter of Britain the Queen also shows foresight. The peoples of these islands are engaged in reordering their historic relationships. England and Ireland, at daggers drawn for 800 years, have come together in healing the open wound of Ulster. Now that the old enmities are at an end, the two nations can cultivate their natural closeness in ways they never felt possible even a short time ago. When the Queen visited the Republic last year, it was an initiative not without risk. But she hallowed the new harmony.

Between Scotland and England, by contrast, relations have grown worse.

Whereas once they stood shoulder to shoulder against the world, today they seem to prefer needling each other. In this sometimes depressing scene there is at least one bright spot. Queen Elizabeth and her First Minister, Alex Salmond, the cheeky chappie and the indulgent grannie, enjoy each other’s company. And this has had a political result too, in prompting Salmond to develop the concept of a “social union” in the British Isles which would continue after Scottish independence. The Queen, still coming to Balmoral every summer, would be its symbol.

Despite the disappointment of eager young hopes and ambitions, the Queen has not faded into bleak disillusion. The painful crisis in the middle of her reign on the contrary ushered in perhaps her most creative period. She has been able to put mature wisdom at the continuing service of her realms in a manner of which they are scarcely aware. There seems no doubt that at the end she will join the ranks of the greatest monarchs. «

• Michael Fry is the author of numerous books including The Scottish Empire and The Union: England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707

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