‘The Queen gently presided over the second Elizabethan age’
HER REIGN WAS MARKED BY POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGES IN BRITAIN, SAYS PEER
WE NEVER expected that she would go so soon.
Even though the Queen was 96, we (at least I) hoped that she would live as long as her mother, who lived beyond 100.
The shock was sudden, but it became clear that despite all the traditions being displayed in working out the theatre of installing a new monarch and saying goodbye to the departed one, Elizabeth II was a messenger and an implementer of modernity in these ancient islands.
The fact that every piece of royal news is being played on live TV is a tribute to her, because she ushered in the television revolution when she allowed the BBC into her palace, as millions watched their monarch ‘live’ the first time back in the mid-1970s.
When she succeeded to the throne on her father’s death in 1952, it was already an outstanding event. News arrived that Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay had climbed Mount Everest for the first time. There were wishes expressed, given her name, that perhaps a second Elizabethan age comparable to the first would be her great contribution. Then, it looked like just a pious wish. But without a doubt now, we can say the Queen – who was monarch for a record 70 years – did rule over an efflorescence of British art, culture, literature, music, theatre which no one could have predicted. She gently presided over the second Elizabethan age
The Second World War showed early on that a new royal style was about to be introduced. George VI and Elizabeth, his Queen, played the people’s royal family to perfection. They stayed in London, toured the country, ate the same rations as their subjects did and kept their morale up. The two princesses did their bit of social service. They broadcast on radio and were seen serving the people.
Princess Elizabeth had a charming Prince Philip as her partner. His family – like all royal families of Europe – had old Victorian roots. The union of Philip and Elizabeth lasted 70-plus years and was extremely happy. Philip played the perfect consort, keeping a step behind, but offering solid support. His death at the age of 99 last year was a severe blow to the Queen and no doubt affected her health. That photograph of her sitting alone in the church at his funeral service is one of the more poignant ones.
The 70 years of the Queen’s rule saw profound changes in Britain’s political standing. Winning the war but losing an empire; refashioning the Commonwealth (to accommodate India becoming a republic, but still staying in); watching over the increasing racial and cultural diversity of Britain so that it is the most multiracial European nation (just look at the list of candidates in the recent leadership race for the oldest political party); presiding over Britain gingerly entering what became the European Union in 1971; and then the exit in 2021.
The Queen’s reign also witnessed the longest occupation by the British military in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. In 1998, the Troubles ended in the Good Friday Agreement and joint rule by the two religious communities who had been contesting for control.
The union was solid (or even rigid) when she came to the throne in 1953. The red letter boxes were changed to display QE II and in Scotland they disliked that because for them she was QE I.
Now we routinely acknowledge that we have three devolved regions besides England. It was part of the relaxed, evolving modernity encouraged by the Queen.
There was a social revolution in the second Elizabethan age. What was a staid, conservative, repressed society broke through into modernity in the 70 years she was monarch. Not only was ‘swinging Britain’ inaugurated in the early 1960s by the Beatles and Rolling Stones and the explosion of pop music, but homosexuality was legalised and abortion became available on the NHS. By the time of the last years of her reign, the full gamut of LGBTQ and their fight for identity became a part of daily debate.
Theatre was rather staid and upper class with playwrights such as Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. That changed in the mid-1950s when ‘the angry young man’ erupted on the scene, challenging all the old conventions of drawing-room theatre. Playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn flourished. The Globe Theatre
was revived and Stratford Upon Avon became the seat of the Royal Shakespeare Company. London staged a global Shakespeare festival.
Opera, ballet and musicals had many venues. The South Bank Centre, the Royal Opera House and the historic West End in London held the fort for the arts. Painters such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Sir Anish Kapoor have made UK a place to enjoy the best of art.
It was during the second Elizabethan age that Britain had its first woman prime minister, way back in 1979. Women entered parliament as legitimate participants. Yet it was also on the issue of her daughter-in-law Diana and her sudden death that the Queen suffered the maximum public disenchantment in what she called ‘annus horribilis’.
It was also during her reign that the United Kingdom began to become aware of the separate nations within the union – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will have to be seen if her successor, King Charles III, can hold the union together.
Elizabeth II leaves behind a sad country, the majority of whose inhabitants have not known any other monarch. She leaves behind a socially transformed but politically confused nation. She was loved by her people, as was evident this year during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.