UK’s greatest women
HISTORY is notoriously hard to plan. Despite the best efforts of millions of people trying to make it, it has a way of making itself. Even the most earth-changing moments of history arose out of things going wrong.
Christianity flourished because Judgment Day failed to materialise at Christ’s crucifixion, prompting Jesus Himself to cry out to God: “Why have you abandoned me?”.
Communism flourished because the megalomaniacal Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to take Russia out of World War I and so sent a stooge called Vladimir Lenin on a train to Moscow to start a revolution.
Hence that old wise saying about the best-laid plans of mice and men. History usually happens by accident.
And that is what makes the reign of Elizabeth II so remarkable.
The Roman empire only survived because every time it faced a threat, a remarkable man happened along to save it, be it Cincinnatus or Gaius Marius or Augustus Caesar.
The British empire was also shaped by three extraordinary leaders, but in this case – despite rules of succession designed to avoid such a scenario – all three were women.
The empire’s foundation began in the reign of Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife, whose ascension to the throne was expressly ruled out by her late brother’s will.
Legal structures aimed to prevent her taking power, yet she became arguably the most important monarch since William the Conqueror, changing Britain from an island backwater to an embryonic word power. Had Elizabeth’s royal navy not defeated the Spanish Armada, the world would now be completely different.
Elizabeth’s pragmatic line on religion probably delayed England’s civil war for a century, a mercy highlighted by the bloodiness that eventually came. Had this period of peace not endured, England’s empire-building would have been impossible.
The apex of this empire was presided over by the next longserving queen, Victoria, whose ascension to the throne also bordered on the impossible. Her father’s three older brothers all died before they could produce an heir and she had no older brother before her.
Another accident of history, and yet she presided over a period of such extraordinary progress that the Victorian age is still regarded as the empire’s defining era.
But Elizabeth II was a by-product of perhaps the most surprising historical accident of all – the shock abdication of Edward VIII to run off with an American divorcee and the reluctant acquiescence of his younger brother to take the throne.
Crowned in the lean years after World War II, she presided over the decline of empire – the long process of decolonisation that began shortly before her coronation with the British partition of and withdrawal from India and Pakistan and continued decades into her reign.
Britons watched as their homeland declined from being the largest empire the world had known to just another country off Europe’s coast. The resultant malaise was political, economic and social. Few of us could ever know what that feels like. Perhaps imagine how you feel when your team loses the grand final and multiply it by a million or so.
And yet throughout this period, there was still one bastion of British greatness, one enduring reminder of England’s world-conquering legacy, in all its brutality and glory. That was Elizabeth, a monarch whose long reign and longer life bookended her nation’s defeat of Nazi Germany and its exit from Europe three-quarters of a century later.
And so there it is, the three longest-serving and most important monarchs in half a millennia of British history, presiding over the foundation, apex and end of empire. All of them were women and all of them were never intended to rule.
There is a lesson in this for any overexcited republicans who think that they can now start planning for Australia’s next phase of nationhood, and it too involves the best-laid plans of mice and men.
You do not need a weatherman to know where the political winds are blowing, nor a barometer to take the national mood. Far from being the much-predicted harbinger of doom for the monarchy in Australia, Elizabeth’s death and the ascension of Charles to the throne appears only to have stirred even more affection for the monarchy.
Perhaps in an uncertain age such ancient institutions are seen as a comfort instead of a millstone.
Either way, there is only one way a republic will happen and it will certainly not be the result of any great plan or piece of paper, nor the activism of its proponents. It is in the hands of history.
In the meantime, the far more profound step of establishing a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament should take first priority. This would be a much nobler and prouder response to the legacy of empire.