9 September 2022 – The photo above is one of my favorite of the Queen. She is seen driving her Range Rover car as she attends the Royal Windsor Horse Show in Home Park, Windsor Castle on 2 July 2021 in Windsor, England. Not shown from this angle, there is a security officer in the car, and only 1 security car following behind her, the photo from a Quillette article that was posted last year about how the Queen felt “most relaxed, most at home” in Windsor – once calling it her “home office”.
There’s not much I can say about Queen Elizabeth that has not already been said. The obituaries published around the world today provide a rich and detailed history documenting her contributions over nine decades of life and seven decades of reign.
But I think her death represents the loss of a generation, a set of values, and a way of life. Queen Elizabeth II reigned during a period of remarkable stability and peace, but also during a time in which duty and self-sacrifice were considered the highest of virtues. Her dedication to her role, and her example of selfless action encapsulate ideals that were unique to her formative years, and that are now, for the most part, fading away.
Elizabeth presided over an era of dramatic change in her country’s fortunes. Having acceded to the throne of a fading empire, she leaves behind a fissiparous, barely united kingdom. Yet she maintained a dignified silence through it all, as the constitution demanded. For better or worse, the monarch’s role in Britain has always been strictly apolitical, and Queen Elizabeth II was long lauded for remaining above the fray of petty party politics and for not inserting herself in messy global affairs. Only rarely did she hint at her own views; over the referendum in 2014 on Scottish independence, for instance, warning her subjects to “think very carefully” before voting. And often her official royal visits around the globe were laden with symbolism.
The troughs of her reign were often caused by familial impropriety: the miserable marriage of Charles and Diana; the involvement of Prince Andrew in a transatlantic sex scandal. That the monarchy as an institution remained so popular was mostly down to Elizabeth’s personal example of duty and self-discipline, qualities less obvious in many family members.
The national mood in Britain is extremely grim. The death of a longtime national figurehead is yet another blow for a crisis-ridden country. Queen Elizabeth II will be an almost impossible act to follow. She embodied continuity in an era of disjunctions.
But we do not need to be a monarchist or a conservative to recognise that her lifetime of service is worthy of the deepest respect and admiration.