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.’”
Despite the searing impact of the first and second world wars, and the end of British India in 1947, the throne to which Elizabeth acceded remained recognisably the imperial institution it had become by the closing decades of Victoria’s reign: a great-power monarchy for the great-power nation many believed and wanted Britain still to be. Indeed, by the early 1950s, it was the only such imperial crown existing anywhere in the world: the Chinese, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman thrones had all vanished during the 1910s, and although the Japanese emperor had survived in 1945, he did so as a deeply discredited sovereign and a much-diminished figure.
By contrast, the British monarchy seemed to be still very much a global, great-power institution, and Queen Elizabeth’s coronation was an appropriately global, great-power event, made the more so because it was the first such occasion ever to be televised. Regiments of colonial and Commonwealth troops once again marched on the streets of London, the prime ministers of the dominions and India were present in Westminster Abbey, and the successful conquest of Mount Everest by a British-led Commonwealth expedition, the news of which reached London on Coronation morning itself, was a triumphant reassertion that Britain was still a nation in every sense at the very summit of the world.
In her broadcast at the end of that euphoric day, Elizabeth made this ringingly confident declaration: “I am sure that this, my coronation, is not a symbol of a power and a splendour that are gone,” she insisted, “but a declaration of our hopes for the future.” Soon after, the Queen and Prince Philip departed on a royal progress of her global realms, and they were rapturously received by vast and enthusiastic crowds, especially in Australia and New Zealand, where no reigning sovereign had previously set foot. And the final part of their journey home was on board the new royal yacht Britannia: the essential mode of transport for the imperial, maritime monarchy that Queen Elizabeth had recently inherited.
Yet for all these fond initial hopes, the most pronounced themes of her long reign were the de-Victorianisation of Britain and the downsizing of its empire. Internationally, this retreat had already begun, as the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 had ushered in a new, bipolar world order dominated by the US and Soviet Russia, and as Britain’s parlous, post-war economic state had necessitated the first phase of imperial withdrawal, not only in south Asia but also in the eastern Mediterranean. From this perspective, Elizabeth’s coronation was more about escapism and make-believe than about engaging with the diminished reality of Britain’s straitened post-war circumstances.
But escapism did not last for long. Three years after the coronation, the Suez fiasco made embarrassingly plain that Britain could no longer act independently as a military power, but only with the acquiescence of the US. In 1957, Empire Day was replaced and superseded by Commonwealth Day, and by the end of the 1960s, the empire itself had largely disappeared, to be replaced by a multiracial Commonwealth from which the adjective “British” was significantly removed. In the same decade, Britain abandoned its military presence east of Suez, turned away from the Commonwealth and what little was left of the empire, and joined the European common market instead.
In the aftermath of the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher claimed to have reversed Britain’s international decline, but she did no such thing, and she handled two other late imperial episodes very differently and much more accommodatingly. The first was the vexed and protracted problem of Southern Rhodesia, which now became legally independent as Zimbabwe. The second was her initiation of negotiations with China over Hong Kong and the impending expiration of Britain’s lease. The result was that in 1997, exactly 100 years after Victoria’s diamond jubilee, the Hong Kong handover marked the end of the British empire, as Prince Charles sailed away into the last imperial sunset on what was, appropriately, the final voyage of the royal yacht Britannia.
While Victoria was on the throne, the British empire kept getting bigger, but while Elizabeth occupied the same position, it kept getting smaller. To be sure, much of “the empire” morphed into “the Commonwealth”, which continued to give the Queen a residual international role. But whereas the empire had been about power, especially British power, the Commonwealth is about sentiment. At the beginning of Elizabeth II’s reign, Britain was still a global player, albeit increasingly lagging behind the US and Russia; by the end, it had become a middle-sized nation which, as Dean Acheson had observed in the early 1960s in words which became even more valid in the ensuing decades, had lost an empire but had not yet found its place in the world.
Across the seven decades of the Queen’s reign, this international downsizing was matched by domestic de-Victorianisation. In the early 1950s, the traditional aristocracy still counted; the middle classes were closely linked with the empire, the military and the civil service; and the working class was overwhelmingly employed in 19th-century heavy industries such as coal mining and the railways. Women knew their (subordinate) place, social mobility was limited, higher education was restricted to a tiny minority, and Britain was an ethnically homogeneous country. The Church of England was a significant force, and the essentially Victorian moral code embraced the death penalty, and proscribed abortion, divorce and homosexuality.
At home, as abroad, Elizabeth II’s reign witnessed massive changes and transformations. The aristocracy is no longer a power elite; the middle classes have ceased to find secure jobs in the empire or the military or the civil service; and the de-industrialisation of Britain means few members of the working class now undertake hard manual labour. Rising standards of living and the widening opportunities afforded by the expansion of higher education have made Britain a more mobile and less deferential society. The influx of immigrants from the dissolving empire made Britain’s population much more diverse, and there are now more practising Muslims than observant members of the Church of England in the UK.
During the 1960s, social attitudes also changed significantly, and the reform of the laws concerning homosexuality, divorce and abortion led to the dismantling of the Victorian moral code. Meanwhile, the widespread use of birth control, combined with increased educational opportunities, means women now occupy powerful and prominent positions to a degree that was unthinkable in the early 1950s – unless you were the young women inheriting the British imperial throne.
So while Queen Victoria would not have been ill at ease in the imperial Britain that survived intact until the early 1950s, she would have been baffled by the very diminished and very different post-imperial Britain that had contracted and evolved by the time of the death of her great-great granddaughter. But how did the British monarchy itself fare during the same period? How far, in response to these far-reaching international and domestic changes, did the House of Windsor correspondingly downsize and de-Victorianise?
By the late 1950s, in the aftermath of Suez, there were criticisms that the royal court was too stuffy and remote. In response, the traditional presentation of debutantes was ended, and the monarchy began to adapt to the “swinging 60s”, as exemplified by Princess Margaret’s marriage to a professional photographer, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and the making of the television film Royal Family, which offered an unprecedented glimpse into the public and private life of the Queen. But instead of aligning the monarchy with the trends of the time, as had been hoped, the result was the very opposite, as the media became ever less deferential and more intrusive, and as a credibility gap began to open up between the de-Victorianised nation that Britain was becoming, and the insufficiently adjusted monarchy.
During the recurrent economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, there was growing criticism of the cost of the royal family; the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral seemed excessively ostentatious; the failed marriages of the Princess Royal, the Duke of York and the Prince of Wales undermined the belief that the royal family was also a happy family; there was a public outcry in 1992 when it was suggested the taxpayer should pay for repairing the fire damage to Windsor Castle; and Buckingham Palace’s initially unimaginative response to the shocking death of Diana, Princess of Wales, provided further evidence that the monarchy was out of date, out of touch and failing to change with the times.
The result, from the late 1990s, was a belated if serious attempt at adaptation: the royal yacht was given up, the Queen agreed to pay taxes on her private income, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public in the summer months. The golden jubilee celebrations of 2002 were relatively low-key, and deftly struck a popular and inclusive tone, and the same was true of the diamond jubilee 10 years later, though on both occasions Commonwealth involvement was minimal. These scaled-back, less extravagant jubilees were a significant indication of how far, during Elizabeth II’s reign, the British empire, the British nation and (eventually) the British monarchy had changed.
Like Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth became a venerated matriarch in her old age. But the grand, uplifting narrative so triumphantly unfolded for the reign of the gas-lit Gloriana could not be replicated a second time around. From the beginning to the end of her reign, Elizabeth presided over an unprecedented period of imperial retreat and national transformation. The monolithic narrative of imperial expansion has been superseded by multiple Commonwealth stories, which are diffuse and increasingly dispersed. And in Britain, lives have become so much more varied and diverse that it is difficult to provide a single, all-encompassing national account.
In personal terms, Queen Elizabeth’s was a life of duty and service, offering stability and reassurance in a rapidly evolving world, and she herself provided a last link to earlier periods of imperial grandeur and national greatness. In historical terms, she adapted to change at home and gradually accommodated the monarchy to the post-imperial, post-Victorian (and postmodern) world, and did so without ever letting on that that was what she was doing. This was scarcely the second “Elizabethan age” so ardently anticipated at her accession, but nor were these trivial accomplishments. By her conduct, her example and her longevity, she did more to hold the country and the Commonwealth together than anyone else who lived in her reign.
