The seemingly eternal monarch

Queen Elizabeth II, the seemingly eternal monarch who became a bright but inscrutable beacon of continuity in the United Kingdom during more than seven decades of rule, has died at Balmoral Castle, her estate in the Scottish Highlands. She was 96.

In her reign, which began in February 1952 after the death of her father, King George VI, Elizabeth served as a constant and reassuring figure in Britain and on the world stage as she helped lead her country through a period of profound shifts in geopolitical power and national identity. The designs of postage stamps and banknotes changed through the decades, but they all depicted the same, if ageing, monarch.

Her son and heir, Charles, summed up the power of her constancy in a rare television documentary aired in 2012 to mark her 60th year as queen. ‘‘Perhaps subconsciously,’’ he said, ‘‘people feel encouraged, reassured by something that is always there.’’

Her last major constitutional action came on Tuesday, when she accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and asked his successor, Liz Truss, to form a government.

In a monarchy dating back to at least the 10th century with King Athelstan, Elizabeth’s reign was the longest. In 2015, she broke a record once thought unassailable, surpassing the 63-year rule of her great-greatgrandmother, Queen Victoria. While Victoria retreated from her regal duties after the early death of her husband, Prince Albert, Elizabeth remained fully engaged in her queenly duties for most of her life, and true to a pledge she made on her 21st birthday.

Then a fresh-faced princess on tour with her parents in South Africa, she broadcast to British Empire listeners around the globe: ‘‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’’

The length of that service, measured against that of other leading figures, proved astonishing – coinciding with that of 15 British prime ministers, 14 US presidents and seven popes. As supreme governor of the Church of England, Elizabeth appointed six archbishops of Canterbury.

She also had to navigate shifting public attitudes toward the royal family.

The low point came in 1997 with the death in a car crash of her former daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, and public anger at the Queen’s halting response to it.

It was one of few missteps, and the crisis passed: By the time of her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Queen Elizabeth was the subject of a four-day love fest that included a waterborne procession on the River Thames that rivalled a mediaeval pageant. Her approval rating stood at 90%.

By the time of her platinum jubilee in 2022 marking her 70 years as Queen, the national celebration had added another dimension, a shared recognition that the reign was almost over and was of a type that would not be seen again.

‘‘While we celebrate the mightiness of Elizabeth II’s allegiance to a life of service, we should also acknowledge that an antiquated version of monarchy must now pass into history,’’ wrote journalist and royal watcher Tina Brown in her 2022 book The Palace Papers.

Nothing captured this moment more clearly than the image of the Queen at her husband’s funeral, held in 2021 amid Covid-19 restrictions. Dressed in black and with her face veiled by a mask, she seemed alone if not isolated in the oaken pews of St George’s Chapel.

The ensuing months were marked by increasing frailty, a rare hospitalisation and a Covid infection. She was unable to perform familiar public duties.

Into her 90s, she maintained a rigorous calendar of events and appearances. They numbered more than 400 in her diamond jubilee year.

Her role as Queen defined Elizabeth’s life, but her unflagging dedication to the job also defined the monarchy. Unlike her sister and several of her children, including Charles, she kept her personal life intact and avoided private scandal and public controversy. The prospect of abdicating was alien to someone who clung not to power, but duty.

The Queen never gave interviews, published her journals or stepped anywhere near the fray of party politics.

In his book The Real Elizabeth, journalist and historian Andrew Marr wrote: ‘‘Her view of her role has been that she is a symbol, and that symbols are better off keeping mostly quiet. The Queen’s style of monarchy has buried much of a sense of self, as we understand that today. The Queen is still what she does. There is only a little space (though an interesting space) between Queen Elizabeth II and the woman who lives her life.’’

Toward the end, as she cut back on public duties and confronted a series of personal crises, that space seemed ever smaller. In 2020, her grandson Prince Harry essentially defected from the royal family after his marriage to American actress Meghan Markle. In 2021, Elizabeth lost her near-lifelong soulmate Prince Philip after 73 years of marriage, and she had to deal with the fall from grace of her second son, Prince Andrew, accused of sexual misconduct.

And yet for most of her reign, the Queen was so deft at subordinating herself to her role that her subjects ‘‘actually know much less about the Queen than they imagine,’’ said biographer Robert Lacey in a 2015 interview. ‘‘But it seems to me that’s less important than that people feel they know her very well.’’

Were it not for a divorce´e from Baltimore, however, the world would hardly have registered a woman known to friends by her childhood nickname of Lilibet. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born a princess on April 21, 1926, at her maternal grandparents’ house in London. Her mother, also Elizabeth, was from Scottish aristocracy. Her father, Albert, Duke of York, was the second son of King George V. Princess Elizabeth’s younger sister, Margaret Rose, was born four years later.

As a child, Elizabeth looked set for a genteel life of relative obscurity as a minor royal.

The Duke of York’s older brother, Edward, was in line to succeed their father as king when he died in early 1936. But by then, Edward (called David by his family) was in love with the American socialite Wallis Simpson, whose impending divorce – her second – made her wholly unfit to become his queen in the eyes of the British establishment, including the Church of England. Edward abdicated and Edward’s brother became King George VI. Suddenly, at the age of 10, Elizabeth lived with a king for a father and the likelihood that she would be queen one day.

During World War II, which ended when she was 19, she conspicuously did not sail to the safety of Canada, as some had advised, but stayed in England and joined the army. By then, she had found her life’s companion, Prince Philip, also a great-greatgrandchild of Queen Victoria and the son of an exiled Greek prince. Philip was making his mark as a young officer in the British navy under the patronage of his uncle Louis Mountbatten.

Their wedding on November 20, 1947, provided what Winston Churchill called ‘‘ a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel’’. Now barely remembered, the storybook nuptials between a radiant princess and a dashing blond naval officer foreshadowed the royal weddings of Prince Charles and the former Diana Spencer in 1981 and Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011.

Elizabeth and Philip had anticipated a long reign for George VI and the chance for a fairly normal life as a navy family, but in 1952, the King died at 56.

Then-Princess Elizabeth and her husband were in Kenya, taking the place of her ailing father on an official visit, when she learned he had died. She flew home as the 25-year-old Queen, to be greeted at the airport by a sombre phalanx of leaders, including Churchill.

Her crowning the following year provided a much-needed dose of glamour and optimism – about a new Elizabethan Age – in a country suffering from postwar austerity, sharp political and social divisions, the dismantling of its colonial empire and declining global influence. Her coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953 – the day word reached London that mountaineer Edmund Hillary of New Zealand had placed a Union Jack atop Mount Everest.

For more than 400 years, the English sovereign has had to navigate the role of being head of state while ceding political power to Parliament and maintaining strict partisan neutrality. By dint of her longevity and diligence, however, Elizabeth had a significant behind-the-scenes advisory role to a succession of prime ministers who travelled each Tuesday from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace to see her. In those sessions, she offered confidential advice from her unique perspective of national life and knowledge. Whether the prime ministers took her counsel may have been another matter. The sessions were as private as conversations in a confessional.

As the monarch of the Commonwealth of 15 realms and more than 50 nations, Elizabeth kept Britain closely linked to its former territories.

As a wife and mother, Elizabeth guarded her privacy with ferocity.

There were times when Prince Philip’s will clashed with the wishes of the prevailing political leaders. He balked at moving to the cavernous and court-dominated Buckingham Palace but was overruled. When his uncle smugly announced after the king’s death that the House of Windsor would become the House of Mountbatten, the name change was swiftly put down by Churchill, to Philip’s humiliation.

As if to compensate for her official pre-eminence, Elizabeth deferred to Philip in the upbringing of their children, a strategy that wrought its own effects, especially with the heir.

Philip decided to send Charles to his alma mater, Gordonstoun, a boarding school on the frigid coast of Scotland renowned for its commitment to building character through rigour and privation. Charles, in middle age, complained of a childhood made unhappy by his mother’s remoteness and father’s authority.

The Queen spent the autumn of her life coming to terms with family scandals but also with a media hunger for them unknown when she was a young Queen.

While Edward put his personal interests ahead of the monarchy, his niece Elizabeth dedicated her life to putting the monarchy first. She had a small and discreet circle of friends and relatives with whom she could decompress from so public a life, but even they would curtsy in greeting to her, and she maintained a certain distance, according to her biographer Sally Bedell Smith.

Smith, in an interview, said she came to understand Elizabeth by delving into her Sunday-morning routines. Elizabeth would worship at the Royal Chapel at Windsor and then drive herself to see her cousin and lifelong friend, Margaret Rhodes, who lived in a cosy cottage on the Windsor estate that the monarch had given her. Elizabeth would sit on a comfortable but faded sofa, sip her favourite cocktail of gin and Dubonnet, and chat with her cousin about the week’s events amid photographs of family.

In a rare reflective mood during an address to the Commonwealth leaders in 2011 in Perth, Australia, Elizabeth summoned an Aboriginal proverb to express her feelings. ‘‘We are all visitors to this time, this place. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love ... and then we return home.’’