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The marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, an American actress of mixed race, was welcomed by the Royal family, the Queen and Prince Philip attending the somewhat unconventional, but undoubtedly popular, wedding in St George’s Chapel in May 2018. The couple became the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on the day. On behalf of English Heritage, I would like to express my deep sadness at the news of the death of Queen Elizabeth II and offer my sincere condolences to the Royal Family. When a household official apologised on the morning after a state banquet that it was difficult to keep the food hot when using gold plates, the Queen replied: “My guests come here not for hot food but to eat off gold plate.”
Even in her ninth decade the Queen was still accumulating historic firsts, notably in her state visit to Ireland in 2011 when she became the first reigning British monarch to visit the Republic for 100 years. After a century of tension, the Queen’s arrival in Dublin signified the normalisation of relations between the two countries. In reaffirming that the name of the Royal family remained Windsor, it departed controversially from the ancient English practice by which children bear the name of their father. Prince Philip found to his dismay that he was fathering a brood not of Mountbattens but of Windsors (though he would have preferred the family name to be Edinburgh rather than Windsor or Mountbatten). On the final day of the formal celebrations, as the Queen made her way to St Paul’s Cathedral for a thanksgiving service, thousands lined the route, breaking into an impromptu chorus of God Save the Queen as the royal motorcade drew up at the steps of the Cathedral.After little more than 10 years on the throne, the Queen effectively lost the most important of them, the choice of a new prime minister whenever the need arose – the Conservative leadership contest of 1963, after Harold Macmillan’s resignation, ushered in a new more democratic era. There remained, however, the right to be consulted, and so the right to encourage and to warn. Those elastic terms enabled her when confronted by any new legislation to sound a note of doubt or caution – or even disapproval. But to do so with confidence and effectiveness required her to be formidably well-informed. When in 2021 he was sued in the US by one of the sex offender Epstein’s alleged victims for sexual assault, the Queen remained supportive of Prince Andrew. He was, after all, her son, and often described as her favourite son. Though public opinion certainly judged him guilty, it was surely understandable that his mother should have been protective. In a year in which she turned 95, and lost her husband of 73 years, it was stressful to have to face these issues, though the Queen remained resilient. They were Winston Churchill (1952-55); Anthony Eden (1955-57); Harold Macmillan (1957-63); Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64); Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-76); Edward Heath (1970-1974); James Callaghan (1976-79); Margaret Thatcher (1979-90); John Major (1990-97); Tony Blair (1997-2007); Gordon Brown (2007-2010); David Cameron (2010-16); Theresa May (2016-19); Boris Johnson (2019-22); and Liz Truss from 2022. The first four were aristocrats, either by birth or marriage; the remainder were of humbler origin (though Blair was educated at a Scottish public school; Cameron and Johnson at Eton). And yet, on she went, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston, up the great bare staircase of her duty, to the end. And what a journey it proved to be. Her first prime minister was born in 1874 and had charged at Omdurman in the reign of her great-great-grandmother; her last was born in 1975 – a span of more than 100 years. With each she worked in self-effacing harmony; though sometimes manipulated by politicians, yet she was always aloof from the arts and artifices of politics.
She lived well into the 21st century: alert and well informed until the end, with only minor concessions to old age, and then only when she was in her 90s. She remained a calm presence: steadfast, with a clear vision of her role as Britain’s monarch and as Head of the Commonwealth, to both of which roles she was wholly committed.
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Nevertheless, she soon resumed public life with her habitual stoicism, opening Parliament in state but in a scaled-down, Covid-secure ceremony. During that summer she appeared to flourish, but by the end of the year, there were hints of mortality, a visit to hospital, and withdrawal from events such as Remembrance Sunday.
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