QEII top of pops as Britain’s longest-serving monarch
LONDON: As Queen Elizabeth II turns 92 on Saturday, Britain’s longest-serving monarch remains as popular as ever, with a Yougov poll last month suggesting 76% of the British public had a “fairly positive” or “very positive” view of the queen.
She is Britain’s joint 329th-richest person, with an estimated wealth of £360 million (R6 billiion), according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2017, despite her fortune plunging from £5.2 billion in the 1989 list.
Overcoming setbacks and challenges in her long life, the queen has always “maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle,” actress Helen Mirren, famous for her portrayal of Elizabeth in The Queen, once said.
Born in London on April 21, 1926, World War II provided the backdrop to the young princess’s formative years. Princess Elizabeth was homeschooled with her younger sister, Princess Margaret.
She was “heir presumptive” after her father became king in 1936 and she began studying law and constitutional history to prepare for her future role, as well as learning art, music, horse-riding and swimming.
She made her first public speech in October 1940, aged 14.
The teenaged Elizabeth spent most of the war years at Windsor Castle outside London, rather than the main royal residence of Buckingham Palace in the heavily bombed capital.
“It was a time of austerity and anxiety for the whole country, including the royal family,” according to her official biography.
The princess’s engagement to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, a naval officer descended from Danish, Greek and German royalty, was announced in 1947 and the couple married a few months later at London’s Westminster Abbey.
Philip, five years older than her, was given the titles Prince Philip and Duke of Edinburgh. Already the mother of Prince Charles and Princess Anne, Princess Elizabeth was thrust into the centre of British political life, aged 25, after her father, George VI, died suddenly in 1952.
After she became Queen Elizabeth II, she gave birth to two more sons, Prince Andrew in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964.
Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 in a ceremony that gripped the nation. The wedding took place two years after Charles’s great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was killed by an IRA bomb placed in his fishing boat.
In 1992, the government announced that the couple would separate. That event, plus a major fire at Windsor Castle, prompted the queen to refer to 1992 as an “annus horribilis” (horrible year).
Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, drawing an outpouring of grief from the public and leading some to criticise the royal family, including the queen, for their alleged coldness towards Diana.
The queen said she was helped through such difficult times by her Christian faith and, like Queen Victoria, whose 63-year reign she surpassed, she has “always been a believer in that old maxim ‘moderation in all things’.”
With the diminishing health of 96-year-old Prince Philip, the queen has attended more engagements alone, or accompanied by younger royals, in recent months. The couple celebrated their platinum wedding anniversary last year.
“I don’t know that anyone had invented the term ‘platinum’ for a 70th wedding anniversary when I was born. You weren’t expected to be around that long,” the queen halfjoked in her latest Christmas broadcast to the nation in December.
Mirren won an Oscar in the 2005 film, and dedicated her award to the Queen. In her acceptance speech, she praised the Queen’s courage: “She’s had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm and she’s weathered many storms.” – DPA/ African News Agency (ANA)