Monarch saw the empire fade, but she unified a great assembly of nations
Queen Elizabeth II will be judged to have been among the most influential royals in any country at any time.
From the moment she became Queen, while watching wildlife from a giant fig tree in Kenya’s Aberdare Mountains, Elizabeth II faced a unique challenge.
All previous monarchs, right up to her own father, King George VI, had come to the Throne in the full expectation that they would defend their sovereign lands and, where possible, expand them. In the words of the old imperial anthem, Land of Hope and Glory: “Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set.”
Not so when it came to this new, 25-year-old Queen. Her mantra would be the exact opposite. Her lifelong task would be to manage withdrawal, reduction and change. At the same time, she had to prop up the self-esteem of a nation which had paid a high price for victory in war and now seemed to be losing the peace. History would judge her on that score, as she well knew.
The British Empire had come to an end with Indian independence in 1947. Less than five years later, the last Emperor, George VI, was dead. His successor inherited a queue of other colonies clamouring for independence. With just two exceptions, all of them would go on to seek membership of the new and entirely voluntary post-imperial club, the Commonwealth. Unlike its predecessor, the “British Commonwealth”, members no longer had to swear allegiance to the Crown, merely to recognise the monarch as the symbolic “Head of the Commonwealth”. Elizabeth II would always regard it as her duty to make it work.
Future historians will, doubtless, find themselves asking the same question: why and how could this diverse group of nations, previously bound together through colonisation and (in most cases) coercion, become such enthusiastic members of a club led by the same Crown which had once governed them? That they did, that it worked and that it has endured to this day is down to one person. Little wonder her passing has sent shockwaves across the planet.
For so much of her record-breaking reign, there was a tendency to underestimate the Queen’s influence. In the post-war media landscape, it has always been the shoutiest and more combative leaders who have made the biggest headlines. Those are two attributes which were never applied to Elizabeth II. Her strategy has been to show, not tell; to act with restraint in the belief that less is more.
In the first few years of her reign, there was a huge tide of goodwill for the new monarch. Her first priority was to visit those loyal realms which had never seen a reigning monarch, notably Australia and New Zealand. Her post-Coronation world tour was the most ambitious in history, separating her from her two young children for six months. The response was astonishing. It is believed that 75 per cent of the Australian people saw her with their own eyes during the mayhem of early 1954. By the end of the 1950s, however, the honeymoon was over. Britain’s disastrous plot to seize the Suez Canal from Egyptian hands in 1956, in collusion with France and Israel, had ended in national humiliation. It was time for post-war, post-imperial Britain to reduce and redefine its role in the world. In essence, this involved sacrificing old colonial networks for two key priorities: securing Britain’s membership of the new European Economic Community and reinforcing the trans-Atlantic alliance with the US. The Queen would be central to both.
Within a year of Suez, she would be drawing million-plus crowds on her first state visit to the US, restoring the so-called special relationship. Though that stalled once again during the Vietnam War, it was the Queen who mended fences, welcoming President Nixon to the Palace and playing a central role in America’s bicentenary in 1976. Her long friendship with the Reagans and close links to two generations of the Bush family ensured that the relationship was as “special” as ever by the turn of the millennium. Through the wounds of 9/11 and the presidency of Barack Obama, she kept it going, regardless of prevailing political and military tensions. Obama greatly enjoyed his state visit with the Queen in 2011. After she turned 90 in 2016, the first non-family visitors through the gates of Windsor Castle were the Obamas.
The Queen was also central to Britain’s troubled European adventure. Through the 1960s and 1970s, successive Prime Ministers used her to promote Britain’s application to join the EEC, culminating in her triumphal 1972 state visit to France and eventual entry in 1973. She would pay a personal price, though. Even her most loyal subjects in Australia and New Zealand took umbrage. Their farmers were suddenly losing a key overseas market. There was also deep pain that when Australians and New Zealanders visited their kith and kin in the UK – home of their head of state – they were forced to queue in the “foreigners” lane at customs while old foes such as Germany sailed through the EEC fast lane. Though no one could blame the Queen personally, some began to reassess their feelings for the “British” monarchy.
The following year, Australia dropped God Save The Queen as the national anthem. Some would later point to this as the start of the journey to Australia’s 1999 referendum on the Crown.
One thing which did not change, however, was the personal commitment of the Queen and her family to all her realms and to her Commonwealth, too. It remained as strong as it had been from the start of the reign. She faced a big test at the start of the 1960s as she was removed as head of state from two African nations for very different reasons. In South Africa, the ostracised Afrikaaner-led apartheid regime abandoned the Crown and then resigned from the Commonwealth before they could be expelled. In newly independent Ghana, meanwhile, prime minister Kwame Nkrumah was promoting himself as the standard bearer for black African autonomy. In 1960, he deposed the Queen as head of state and installed himself as president, yet a year later she was still on her way to Ghana at his invitation. A series of bomb explosions in the capital, Accra, had led to calls for her visit to be cancelled. She was having none of it. As she told British prime minister Harold Macmillan: “How silly I should look if I was scared to visit and then [Soviet leader] Khrushchev went and had a good reception.” She knew that the Soviets were keen to woo Ghana over to the communist side in the Cold War with funding for the huge Upper Volta Dam project. She also knew that if she cancelled her trip, Nkrumah might feel snubbed and then abandon the Commonwealth, encouraging other African nations to do the same. That would have had dire consequences for the organisation. The stakes could hardly have been higher and the Queen was determined to make the visit a great success. Once photos had gone around the world of a beaming Queen dancing with Nkrumah, however, the mood changed completely. The Head of the Commonwealth had clearly shown where her priorities lay. Macmillan was able to call up US President John F Kennedy and say: “I have risked my Queen. You must risk your money.” A month later, American backing was in place for the Upper Volta Dam.
Sometimes, though, her Commonwealth role could put her on a dangerous collision course with her own prime ministers. When the younger member states decided to set up a London-based secretariat with a secretary-general, the Queen gave them a royal palace (Marlborough House) to lend it kudos. However, Harold Wilson’s government treated the first secretary-general (Canada’s Arnold Smith) like a minor functionary. So the Queen responded by inviting Smith to dinner and awarding him precedence over every other diplomat in London. She was furious after British Prime Minister Edward Heath formally advised her not to attend the 1971 Commonwealth summit in Singapore, ahead of a toxic row over UK arms sales to South Africa. She would not let it happen again. When Heath tried to stop her going to the next one in Canada, she ensured that she was invited in her capacity as Queen of Canada. That way, it was no business of the British government.
Her mediation skills were especially important during prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s years in Downing Street. In 1979, the Commonwealth was due to meet in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, just 112km from the border with war-torn Rhodesia, then a British colony in which the white minority government had declared independence while still denying a vote to the black majority. The African members of the Commonwealth were determined to use the summit to pile pressure on white Rhodesia. However, Mrs Thatcher and her New Zealand counterpart, Robert Muldoon, regarded Rhodesia’s two black rebel armies (one backed by the Soviets, one by the Chinese) as communist terrorists. The two PMs were plotting to stop the Queen from going to Lusaka at all, until the Palace issued a statement saying how much the monarch was looking forward to it and off she went. Many years later, British state papers would reveal just how integral the Queen had been in securing a behind-the-scenes consensus, one which led directly to the end of the Rhodesian civil war and the peaceful creation of Zimbabwe.
The Queen played a similar unifying role in holding the Commonwealth together through the 1980s during bitter disputes over the issue of sanctions against South Africa. After the collapse of apartheid and the election of South Africa’s first black leader in 1994, one of president Nelson Mandela’s first executive acts was to reunite his nation with the Commonwealth. The Queen was thrilled and the two leaders went on to become firm friends, so much so that he was the only non-royal world leader to call her “Elizabeth” – and get away with it.
Though the importance of the Commonwealth might slowly decline, it would still keep growing, acquiring more than 50 members and a waiting list.
Through it all, back in the UK, the Queen’s subjects would take much of this for granted. She was so dependable that it only made big headlines on the handful of occasions when she failed to turn up for something. Yet, when Britain was an economic basket case, as it was for much of the 1970s, or paralysed by uncertainty, as it was during the Covid pandemic, it was the Queen who offered her people a sense of national pride. More than any politician, she could offer reassurance that some things would never change.
Addressing the funeral of former Israeli president, Shimon Peres, in 2015, Barack Obama sought to distil the essence of leadership. He singled out two “giants of the 20th century that I’ve had the honour to meet”, two legends “whose lives span such momentous epochs, that they find no need to posture or traffic in what’s popular in the moment”. They were Nelson Mandela and the Queen.
It’s why her place in history is beyond question. The only issue – and it is one which will keep historians busy for years to come – is where she stands in the pantheon of British and world monarchs. By any standards, she is going to have to end up pretty near the top.
Robert Hardman is author of Queen of Our Times and writes for the London’s Daily Mail.
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