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Queen Elizabeth II

A lifetime of service and duty

Dr Martin Farr reflects on the life of Queen Elizabeth II.

It could not have been more appropriate that the last public photograph of Queen Elizabeth II was taken two days before her death and was of her undertaking official duties. Indeed, she was performing perhaps her single most important duty: inviting a Prime Minister to form a government. Duty may be regarded as defining her reign.

Outgoing and incoming Prime Ministers having to make round trips to Balmoral from Westminster in this second week of September 2022 was an indication both of continuity – Liz Truss is the Queen’s fifteenth premier; the first was Winston Churchill – and change: in 1974 she flew from Australia to be in Buckingham Palace in time to receive the Prime Minister. 

A reign of length spans change

That it was always known this moment would come does little to diminish its impact, even for those who may feel little or no personal or political sympathy with the Queen as a person, the Royal Family as an institution, or monarchy as a constitutional arrangement. The announcement of her death will be a moment few who know of it will forget, almost as imperishable as the memory of the moment of their meeting will remain for the many who met her.

A reign of length spans change. In the case of Elizabeth II, such change was not just in the events but in their acceleration. The ‘new Elizabethan era’, as it was called in the early 1950s, was also the ‘jet age’; seventy years later she negotiated a global pandemic by co-opting video conferencing, just as her father had embraced radio broadcasts in the 1930s. It was clear that 2022’s jubilee – her seventieth – would be her last; there is unlikely ever to be another Platinum regal celebration.

The announcement of her death will be a moment few who know of it will forget, almost as imperishable as the memory of the moment of their meeting will remain for the many who met her.

Dr Martin Farr

Monarchs are accidental, are creations of circumstance, but some more than others. Initially she had no expectation of serving. One of the many remarkable aspects of the Queen’s reign is that it produced the two most experienced public figures in the world – Elizabeth II and Charles III – but did so only because in 1936 her uncle, Edward VIII, declined to make the sacrifices required by his station, and abdicated.

So much of her reign was in the manner of that of her father, thrust into the role by an older brother who did not value duty. George VI passed the spirit of service to his daughter, who succeeded him in 1952. The Queen was not by nature a reformer, but was open to change; her father was perfectly happy with a Labour government and a welfare state under Clement Attlee in 1945. No longer Emperor of India, portraiture presented him as head of a middle class family.

The Sovereign’s ascendancy derived from leading by example, beginning with the young adult in uniform in the Second World War – with which she was almost our last connection – a war which framed her life, as it tended to for those who lived through it. It reflected broader social change that though her purpose was principally public service, her descendants were increasingly viewed through the lens of celebrity. Prince Philip’s 1969 Royal Family documentary came to be regretted – too much ‘daylight’ let in upon ‘magic’ – while the twenty-first century paring of the family into ‘working royals’, and the centrality of the line of succession, pointed to its intended future.