The 96-year-old once said, ‘The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts.’ She will forever be in our memory
Elizabeth Windsor had seen it all.
Her life had been a fortress, protected from realities on the ground by walls and gates and gilded railings like the 775-room Buckingham Palace, not to mention contingents of infantry and cavalry soldiers charged with guarding her, the other royals, and their residences, but she had seen it all.
She was thrust upon the British throne on Feb. 6, 1952, following the death of her father, King George VI. She was 25.
It never crossed Elizabeth’s mind that she would be queen, like her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, that is until her infamous uncle, Edward III, King of the United Kingdom from Jan. 30, 1936 until December of the same year, when he abdicated the throne to marry non-British, non-royal, non-Anglican American divorcee Wallis Simpson, left his brother Albert, Bertie to the family, no choice but to take his place as George VI, British king from 1936 to 1952.
Elizabeth’s ascension to the British throne had been a twist of fate, but she stuck to it, playing her role to the hilt. Hers was a life devoted to service, duty, and faith. In May 2011, she broke the record as second longest-reigning monarch in British history, next to Queen Victoria. That record previously belonged to George III, of whom Elizabeth II was a direct descendant on both her grandfather George V's side and her grandmother Queen Mary's. Since Sept. 9, 2015, she had become the longest-reigning monarch in British history, surpassing Victoria who reigned for 63 years and 216 days.
The most we could do to get a glimpse of what had truly been in Queen Elizabeth II’s mind was to craft historical fiction like The Crown because she kept herself on guard at all times. She was a very private public personality—hardworking, pleasant, conscientious, faithful, never ostentatious, despite her love for loud colors like red, green, purple, or chartreuse. Always, she kept her cards close to her chest or revealed only to her immediate family the side of hers that would sometimes utter words like bloody or bonkers or damn, or the side that loved jigsaw puzzles or the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” or a game of charades. As much as she loved her Pembroke Welsh corgis, she loved racehorses, particularly a Saskatchewan thoroughbred named Burmese, a gift from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Grief is the price we pay for love.
—Queen Elizabeth II
In her 70-year reign, she hardly granted any interviews with the press, although we could read so much about her from unnamed friends who would divulge things to Vanity Fair like, “For (Elizabeth), there are only three levels of human beings: one, herself, not as a person but as The Queen; two, her family; and three, everyone else. So for her the poshest duke is the same as the lowest chambermaid,” or from her nonconformist grandson Prince Harry, who once said of her, “We have a really special relationship, we talk about things she can’t talk about with anyone else.”
But yes, Elizabeth had seen it all and, based on her actions, not her words, we might deduce that at least since the 1970s, she had begun to show attempts to adjust, presenting herself for one as less stuffy, less blindly traditional, and with a sense of humor, calling the year 1992, for instance, self-depracatingly as the royal family’s annus horribilis on account of the separation of her sons Prince Charles and Prince Andrew from their respective wives, Diana, princess of Wales, and Sarah, duchess of York. In the same year, her second child and only daughter Anne, princess royal, also divorced her husband, English Olympic gold medal-winning horseman Mark Philipps.
Annus horribilis, indeed, but way before all this happened, the queen seemed ready to accept that life, even for royalty, was no fairy tale. In 1970, for example, she allowed TV cameras into the royal residence to give the public a glimpse of her family’s domestic life. She also did not get in the way of the formal dissolution of her sister Princess Margaret, countess of Snowdon’s marriage to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones. Since Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh’s divorce in 1901, it was the first for a senior member of the British royal family.
In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide terrorist attacks in New York, Queen Elizabeth II comforted those who had lost loved ones by telling them that “grief is the price we pay for love.” She too had proved worthy of the price of grief. She had been a big presence in the world—and so collectively we mourn her loss, though we rejoice that death, which visited her at the Balmoral Castle, a royal residence in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022, might have proved more gentle to her than life might have been, considering the pressure that must have weighed on her for 70 years. Prince Harry, Prince William, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, and more of the family she treasured through thick and thin—she is survived by four children, eight grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren—rushed to her side upon hearing the news.
For sure, we will miss her and many things about her, like her annual Christmas broadcast, but such is life. As Queen Elizabeth II herself said, in opening her holiday message for the people of the UK in 2001, “I have lived long enough to know that things never remain quite the same for very long.”