When Queen Elizabeth II stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waved to her people, she couldn’t help but look at her great-great-grandmother. Right in front of the main gate rises the “Victoria Memorial”, which commemorates a monarch who – as before her only the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century – gave her name to an entire age. Now, after her death, Queen Elizabeth II could also become an era name. Where Elizabeth I stood for the dawn of England and Victoria for the heyday of the Empire, Elizabeth II represented a country that had peacefully found its way back into the ranks during the 70 years of her tenure.
When Elisabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born in London on April 21, 1926, the British Empire had reached its maximum extent and was already bearing the seeds of decay. The liberation movements gained momentum in the colonies, while other Western powers such as Germany and America eclipsed Britain’s productivity and challenged her supremacy. The Windsors were also affected by the ideological and moral upheavals of the time. Elisabeth watched with the bright eyes of a child as her stuttering father surprisingly had to ascend the throne in 1936 after his older brother – Edward VIII, who was flirting with the Nazis – abdicated because of a love affair with an American woman. The whole of the Queen’s later life, wrote her German biographer Thomas Kielinger, can be described as an “attempt to reverse these conditions – to put duties before private happiness”.
The young crown princess experienced the Second World War, which heralded the end of the British Empire, in the seclusion of the numerous family homes. Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, four years her junior, moved from Balmoral Castle in Scotland to Sandringham House in Norfolk, and from there to the Royal Lodge and later to Windsor Castle, near London. Governesses took care of their education. Amid the German air raids on London, Elisabeth called for perseverance on the BBC’s children’s programme: “We are trying everything we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, just as we are trying to do our share in the dangers and sorrows of war to wear. We know, each of us, that everything will be fine in the end.”
At the time, Elisabeth was 14 years old and had known for a long time what was to come. Four years earlier, when her father ascended the throne, Margaret asked her if she would one day become queen. “I think so,” was the laconic reply.
When the time finally came – her father died young, in February 1952 – she lay in a meadow in Kenya and watched grazing rhinos with Philip, her husband. The young couple, whose lives would henceforth be spent in the service of the Crown, took a long walk and, aware of the hardships to come, made their return journey. At the sight of the black state cars waiting at London Airport, the only 25-year-old Elisabeth is said to have escaped: “Ah, the hearse.”
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