May 29, 2017

By Professor Andrew Roberts

The 91st birthday of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II seems to be a good time to investigate what this remarkable woman means to Great Britain, the Commonwealth and the world, and why. For Chinese people, who have not had an hereditary Head of State since 1911, the whole concept of a crown and throne might seem absurdly anachronistic, but somehow it works for Britain and the fifteen other countries of which she is queen.

The fact that The Queen is in good health, and even as a nonagenarian carries out over three hundred public engagements per year, is remarkable. Her father King George VI died at the age of 56 but her mother was 101 when she died, and their daughter shows few signs of slowing down in the role. The commendable respect that the Chinese traditionally show to older and more experienced people is not always displayed in Britain, but it certainly is towards The Queen, who is universally admired, even by republicans who politically do not support the monarchy as an institution, such as the Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

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There are very many advantages in having a monarch as experienced as ours, and a few disadvantages. The wisdom, professionalism and commitment to duty of this remarkable woman are apparent to everyone. The disadvantage is of course that Prince Charles will presumably be well into his seventies – or perhaps even his eighties – before he ascends the Throne, with Prince William possibly in his forties or fifties before he in turn becomes Prince of Wales.

For there is no tradition of Abdication in the House of Windsor, and nor should there be. When the Queen’s ‘Uncle David’ – King Edward VIII – abdicated the throne in 1936 and became the Duke of Windsor it was considered a terrible betrayal of duty by the whole of the rest of the family. Aged only ten at the time, the Queen was deeply affected by the understanding that her father would have to take on the role of monarch, and the terrible strain of it (especially during the second world war) probably led to his health complications that severely shortened his life. For a woman as committed to doing her duty as the Queen, abdication equals betrayal of duty and is therefore not considered an option for her.

On her 21st birthday in April 1947 the then Princess Elizabeth broadcast to the Commonwealth from Cape Town, saying: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.’ Fortunately it is turning out to be long, and if the Queen has her mother’s great longevity – as she already seems to – it will be much longer still. She has already beaten Queen Victoria’s other great record of length of reign, at 63 years to become last September the longest-serving monarch in British history.

These are not just paper records, of interest only to historians and monarchists; in fact they say important things about what kind of a nation Britain became during the Queen’s long lifetime. Many great changes have profoundly altered the country since the Queen came to the Throne in February 1952 and having the same person as our Head of State has given Britain a social stability that has occasionally been invaluable in times of crisis.

We cannot know what was said in her weekly audiences with her thirteen prime ministers – it is one thing they do keep secret – but we can be certain that she has counselled calm deliberation and has sagely carried out her duties to ‘advise, encourage and warn’. For a prime minister who wasn’t even born when she came to the Throne, such as the ex-premier David Cameron, to hear from the Queen what Sir Winston Churchill once told her about various issues is a tremendously valuable aid for any modern politician.

The past 65 years have seen any number of national traumas – from the Suez Crisis in Egypt in the Fifties, the Aberfan mining disaster in the Sixties, trade union militancy and mass immigration in the Seventies, the Falklands War of the Eighties, the exchange control debacle and death of Princess Diana in the Nineties, Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism in the 2000s, and now Brexit – but through it all there has been the unchanging, soothing presence of ‘Elizabeth the Good’. She has been, as the historian John Grigg put it, ‘a bastion of stability in an age of social and moral flux’.

Throughout this period of bewildering political, social and moral change, in which the traditional certainties of the early 1950s were comprehensively ripped up and replaced by a very different kind of Britain, has been the unchanging decency, wisdom and sanity of the Queen, which has helped to give Britons a sense of national unity and continuity. It was in the reign of Elizabeth II that Britain gave up its pretensions of being a superpower on equal footing with Russia, China and America, and instead readjusted to a much more realistic and honest, if less exalted, place in the world.

The Queen’s profound personal commitment to the ideals of the Commonwealth, of which she is the Head, has brought Britain a presence in Africa and Asian countries that Britain would not have had without her. During her reign the Union Jack was hauled down across those two continents, but without the kind of internal political dissensions that were seen in France during the decolonisation process, where there were bloody street riots and several assassination attempts on their Head of State, Charles de Gaulle.

If it has not been for her belief in the Commonwealth as a positive force in the world, the institution would probably have collapsed in the 1970s and 80s, as dictatorship eclipsed democracy in all too many of its member states. Today, however, democracy has returned in many of them – although tragically not to Zimbabwe – and her faith has been shown to be proved right. It used to be joked that the Commonwealth had nothing in common and no wealth, but today it is once again a worthwhile global institution. The reason Britain didn’t give up on it years ago was because of the optimism of its Queen.

When Queen Victoria reached her eighties she was bowed and bent, often ill (certainly hypochondriacal), obesely fat, clad usually in black and only seen to smile rarely, at least in public. She seemed, if anything, older than she actually was. By total contrast, her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II is healthy, straight-backed, wears light colours, smiles a great deal and has a trim figure. As a result she looks considerably younger than 91. Instead of being dark twilight years, the Queen is still the most conscientious public servant that Britain has at a senior level.

Queen Victoria was succeeded by Edward VII who, because of her longevity, did not have long on the Thone – less than a decade – but who made a fine king nonetheless and lent his name to the optimistic, forward-looking ‘Edwardian’ period in British history. Although Prince Charles’ time on the Throne must necessarily be foreshortened by his mother’s longevity, there is no reason to suspect that his long and intensive training for the job – a half-century royal apprenticeship programme – will not be crowned with eventual success one day. Certainly the Duchess of Cornwall has turned out to be a graceful and dignified consort for him, confounding the negative expectations of some. The Queen is also superbly supported by her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, to whom she has been married for seventy years this November.

‘Monarchs shouldn’t be ahead of the times, or even abreast of them,’ said one of the Queen’s former private secretaries, Sir Martin Charteris. ‘But they must never fall behind them.’ The Queen has certainly never done that, and Britons should celebrate – in this youth-obsessed age – their good fortune as a country in having a monarch as wise and experienced as her.

By doggedly preaching a gospel of duty and public service, the Queen has promoted an alternative to the unrelenting creeds of individualism and collectivism in that watershed decade the 1980s. Her promise to the nation on her 21st birthday, that ‘my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong’ was not dependent on reward or remuneration, but was one she has kept faithfully.

The scandals of political corruption of the Nineties, if anything, illustrated yet more starkly how important it is to have an institution like the Crown that is completely above politics. No flicker of a suspicion of personal corruption has ever been laid at the Queen’s door, which probably accounts for much of her popularity amongst a public that is now highly cynical about the probity of politicians and other public servants. In Asian and South American countries people riot against the corruption of their heads of state; in Britain they have no cause.

In one person is invested the duties of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, head of state, senior civil servant, mother of the next monarch, the fount of the honours system, and Head of the Commonwealth. Imagine the opportunities for scandal and corruption if these jobs were to be distributed around a number of people – some elected, others not – rather than concentrated in the person of one sovereign lady who has never once in half a century been morally compromised in any of her great tasks.

The other great bulwark the Queen provides is that against the megalomania of elected politicians. Politicians who get so hubristic they start to think of themselves as supermen were the reason that the twentieth century was stained with so much blood. Monarchy protects nations from that. However much power politicians might try to aggregate for themselves in Westminster and Whitehall, there is always someone living in Buckingham Palace who is more powerful than they. It has proved a powerful psychological bar against over-mighty rulers. Consider the words of Tony Blair when the Queen asked him to form his first government in 1997, when she very subtly put her tenth prime minister in his proper place: ‘She was very good to me. She very much put me at my ease. Though she did say that Winston Churchill was the first prime minister that she dealt with. That was before I was born, so I got a sense of my relative superiority, or lack of it, in the broad sweep of history.’

In her Coronation Oath the Queen gave a solemn promise to govern her peoples ‘according to their laws and customs’, and to ‘cause law and liberty, in mercy, to be executed’, and she has kept her word to the best of her ability. Small wonder that countries are queuing up to join the Commonwealth, that a Gallup Poll has found that 54% of 16 to 34 year olds think that the Queen should be given ‘a more substantial role in government’, and that up to two million Britons lined the streets of London to cheer her at her Golden and Diamond Jubilees.

Of course monarchies do not work in every society; there has to be a long history of it to give it legitimacy, and also there are plenty of examples in history of very bad kings and queens who did great damage to their countries. It is not a constitutional system that would suit America or China, for example, with their proud republican traditions. But in Britain and the other Commonwealth countries of which Elizabeth II is queen – such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand – it is a system bordering on genius. For in the end human governance comes down to character, and in ‘Queen Elizabeth the Good’ Britons have found as fine a moral character as it is possible to have in a person. By its very genetically accidental nature, monarchy must be something of a lottery. In Elizabeth II, the British people feel they have won that lottery.


© This article was originally published by Tencent Dajia and is republished with permission. Tencent is the largest Chinese web portal in China. It is a large-scale integrated web portal with Tencent’s news, interactive community, entertainment products and basic services.

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