White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Elizabeth, the Essential Queen, Dies

Queen Elizabeth II in coronation regalia

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“The Queen is dead. Long live the King.”

Some would add to that traditional and ringing appeal, “God save the monarchy.” It may not need saving, but the British monarchy won’t be the same. Queen Elizabeth II was a one off, as they say.

I clearly remember the death of King George VI, and the ascent of Elizabeth. I was living in a far corner of the British Empire, in Southern Rhodesia.

In the colonies, we were a study in patriotism, and we believed in Britain and the empire itself as nearly a divine intention. We almost believed in the divinity of the monarch.

More, we believed that the new queen, so beautiful and young and hopeful, would usher in a new era of Elizabethan greatness. A new Queen Bess set to restore the fortunes of Britain after the savagery of two world wars.

It wasn’t to be, of course. The winds of change were rustling, if not yet blowing, and Britain’s global manufacturing dominance wasn’t to return. Gradually, we were to learn that our vision of Britain as the great civilizing force, the happy world policeman, was fantasy.

But Elizabeth kept her promise. The promise she made on her 21stbirthday, “I declare before you all, that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of that great imperial family to which we all belong.”

She kept to the letter and the spirit of that promise. Through all these decades of convulsive change, Elizabeth has been as constant as the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the remnants of the time when the sun really didn’t set on the British Empire.

Elizabeth wasn’t a great mind, a visionary, or even a woman who understood a great deal of what she saw and was told. Arguably, she wasn’t even a very good mother. But she was, every day of her long, long reign, the embodiment of that word from the days of empire “duty.”

Elizabeth did her duty every day of her life and did it completely. How many thousands of native dances did she endure? How many school choirs did she hear? How many awful heads of state did she break bread with and chat about the weather? A famous cover of the satirical magazine “Private Eye” had a picture of her greeting Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, and a balloon quote from her said, “Do you have any interesting hobbies?” One from her husband, the late Prince Philip, said, “Yes, he is a mass murderer.”

Her real love was horses. She was a devoted equestrian who rode, against physicians’ advice, shortly before she died.

Queen Elizabeth II will be remembered for much, and it must include rising above her dysfunctional family.

In England, I covered the marriage of her sister Margaret who, hiding behind the dubious cover of one forbidden love affair, lived the life of a princess about town — no hint of duty or hard work there. At the time of her marriage to the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, royal mania gripped the country. It was an emotional outpouring not to be equaled in intensity until the death of Princess Diana.

The Queen’s sense of humor shone through when she termed one awful personal year as an “annus horribilis.” Always her sense of being human was entwined with her regal demeanor.

Save for the funeral of the beloved Elizabeth, one can expect a huge loss of stature by the monarchy. Charles, the new king, is an odd duck. He has good intentions, but he doesn’t inspire. His son, the future King William, has yet to prove that he is more than an average young man with a strong-willed wife, the future Queen Catherine.

The monarchy will survive because Brits like it, not the way they came to love Elizabeth, but because it is a useful institution. And, in a time of wobbly political leadership, institutions are an important shock absorber to democracy’s vagaries.

With a monarch, people can believe there is order beyond the disorder of the political process. When I came to the United States in 1963, I was struck by how we, the people, had no place to hang our emotions on, besides on the president – and, at any time, about half the people dislike the president.

Elizabeth wasn’t born to be queen but came into the succession because of the abdication of her uncle Edward VIII. She began her duty driving an ambulance during World War II –and duty was a driving force in her long reign.

Never, forget the royals provide the greatest show on earth with all that pomp and ceremony, loved by the Brits and the tourists.

Watch the greatest funeral you have ever seen unfold on the television. This great queen will be buried as none other has — on television.

God Save the Queen. She Is Unique

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She is the best-known woman in the world, and she has been since 1952 when Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, at age 25, became Queen Elizabeth II. Although she has a huge list of titles, she is to most people simply the queen. And she has been the only British monarch in most people’s lives: She has always seemingly been there.

Once Queen Elizabeth was young and quite pretty; now she is old and quite beloved. She works very hard, whether it is presiding over meetings with prime ministers – she has dealt with 12 of them, starting with Winston Churchill — or applying herself to an endless schedule of charity events. She has visited 116 countries. I have always wondered at her incredible tolerance, no endurance, at watching cultural events in faraway lands: How many children’s choirs, folk dancers or synchronized gymnasts can a human being watch? In the case of the queen, the number seems to have been infinite.

When she came to the throne, she set off a surge of hope in Britain and the Commonwealth. Popular mythology, as I remember, held that a new Queen Elizabeth would bring a revival of fortune for Britain — the second Elizabethan period would be as great as the first Queen Elizabeth’s reign, from 1558 to 1603.

After World War II, Britain was adjusting to a new order in most things, including the social changes introduced by the Labor government immediately after the war, such as national health insurance, and the recognition that Britain was no longer be the preeminent world power, ruling a quarter of the world. The empire was shrinking, and Britain felt exhausted and lessened.

But the new, young queen signaled hope, and the royal family shot to a position of public adulation. I remember covering the wedding of the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, to the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, when Britain went was in a kind of royal hysteria. That began to fade as the decade wore on, and that marriage began to creak and eventually dissolve.

As royal scandals multiplied and Britain became a trendsetter in fashion and the arts, Princess Diana, during and after her marriage to Prince Charles, stole much of the queen’s thunder.

The queen said her worst year was 1992, which she famously called an “annus horribilis” in a Nov. 24 speech at Guildhall to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession. Newspapers wondered whether the monarchy was finished and whether it would either give way to a republican Britain or to one where the constitutional monarch was of little importance, as in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.

But Queen Elizabeth persevered and, she just turned 89, is more loved than ever. She is slightly old-fashioned, even as Buckingham Palace is anxious to remind us she e-mails and tweets.

She is a fabulous piece of English bric-a-brac in her omnipresent hat and gloves. Though perfectly dressed in her way, she is not a fashion idol. She was a fine horsewoman. She attends cultural events, but seems only to have a passion for horses and dogs. Critics have faulted her for how limited she is in some ways. It may be that at this point, she is as much an anachronism as the monarchy, and there is strength in that.

No longer do comedians make fun of her piping voice and her ability to ride out gaffes, like the time in Canada when she read the wrong speech, having forgotten which city she was visiting. The British might have come to love her for her famously dysfunctional family — even Charles, her quirky son and heir to the throne. Scandals have touched all of her family, excepting herself and her husband Prince Philip, although one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting told me that he was busy in that circle when he was young.

When she does die, Britain will enter into the most extraordinary period of mourning, followed a year or so later by a coronation. The change will be enormously expensive, from the queen’s burial to the coronation of the king. Tens of thousands of items stamped with ER (Elizabeth Regina) or the queen’s face, including mail boxes, stamps and the 20-pound note, will have to be changed.

Happily and gloriously, after 62 years as queen, Elizabeth is, physically as well as emotionally, part of British life. She is also, in a way, the world’s queen. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

In Britain, Another Round of the Greatest Show on Earth

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I have history with royal weddings–just a little, but history nonetheless.

As Princess Margaret, sister to Queen Elizabeth II, was tying the knot on May 6, 1960, with Antony Armstrong-Jones, a photographer who would become Lord Snowdon, I was out finding “color” for a London news agency.

My assignment was to ride back and forth on a ferry across the River Thames.

From a phone box on one side of the river to a phone box on the other, I scurried, breathlessly reporting on every Union Jack and every wide-eyed child. That was a day on which Britain lost its head.

It was maybe the last great royal ceremony in which the British public was still wholly innocent.

Although some newspapers had debated the suitability of a mere photographer marrying into the royal family, the public had still wanted the fairy-tale wedding.

Yet it was Margaret, and this ill-fated union, that first lifted the veil on royal goings-on and began to show them not as a perfect family, but as a dysfunctional one, not as perfect servants of the people but as greedy, immoral, selfish and sometimes heartless.

This was fed by the new ability of the British tabloids to spy electronically on the royal persons.

But on that beautiful day, it seemed that everyone in Britain wanted to believe in the princess and her commoner husband.

Of course, the queen and her children would have to disappear for Margaret to become queen.

But she was in line for the throne, and that made her worthy of the national hallucination: The Glass Coach, drawn by matched pairs of horses; the impeccably choreographed regimental bands; the glorious color of noblemen’s robes; and–oh my, yes–the ladies’ hats.

And the queen herself, young and radiant with her consort, Prince Philip, always at her side, neither quite participant nor spectator.

It was the Greatest Show on Earth. Even Cecil B. DeMille could not have produced that kind of spectacle, centuries in the making.

When Prince William marries Kate Middleton–another commoner but not exactly a flower girl–it will be the greatest show on earth again.

Fortunately for the royal family, they are back in favor after three decades, when things sometimes looked bleak for the future of the monarchy.

Despite national misgivings about Prince Charles, eldest son of the queen, and his quirky ways, to say nothing of the way he treated his first wife, Princess Diana, and the way she reciprocated, Britain is again comfortable with its monarchy, even enthusiastic about it.

The thanks for this go to the queen–her long reign, her hard work and her perseverance. And partly to Diana, who in death refurbished the magic.

Queen Elizabeth is not a brilliant woman. She does not have wide interests outside of, well, being queen, a job that has no published job description–and her family.

She has tried to be more modern and to be a little closer to her subjects.

But it was probably the year in which the family seemed to have imploded that reinforced the queen’s relationship with her subjects.

Her Christmas message in 1992, in which she described the travails brought on by Charles and Diana and her humiliation as “annus horribilis,” meaning horrible year, brought forth a wave of sympathy.

It said that this remote lady, who had been their queen since before most of them were born, was not superwoman but a mum who made mistakes and who had children who misbehaved and disgraced the family.

This was a very human queen, set in authority over them, but still one of them.

Suddenly she was not aloof and imperious, but very human.

Not everyone in Britain is elated that Will and Kate are marrying after living together on and off for nearly a decade.

One social critic told me, “It sets a terrible example: Commitment-phobic men living with women and then mostly moving on. At least, they are marrying. But the hypocrisy of it! She will wear white, I suppose.”

And one day, she will wear a crown as Queen Consort of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and 15 other independent Commonwealth countries around the world.

Long live the Greatest Show on Earth: The British monarchy.