![Churchill Parliament Square](https://winstonchurchill.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Churchill-parliament-sq-002.jpg)
HM Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Ascot 2010 horse race meeting.
“Famous have been the reigns of our Queens,” Winston Churchill told the nation when Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father as sovereign in 1952. The Prime Minister recalled: “Some of the greatest periods in our history have unfolded under their sceptres.”
Sixty-five years on, we now know that the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth have in this Second Elizabethan Age enjoyed the greatest period of prosperity in their history and a much more peaceful time than during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century.
From her earliest days on the throne at age twenty-five, Her Majesty pledged faithfully to follow her late father’s example “of service to his Peoples and the preservation of Constitutional Government.” This she has done impeccably for six and a half decades. We saw it again only this May when, at ninety-one, Her Majesty travelled to Manchester to pay hospital visits to the victims of a terrorist attack.
When hailing the accession of his young, new monarch, the seventy-seven-year-old Churchill concluded: “I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian Era, may well feel a thrill in invoking, once more, the prayer and the Anthem, ‘God Save the Queen!’”
The International Churchill Society warmly endorses the royal sentiments expressed by the man whose legacy we serve to preserve and promote. In Her Majesty’s tenth decade, we join with others round the world in singing “long live our noble Queen!”
-Laurence Geller CBE, Chairman, International Churchill Society
HM Queen Elizabeth II’s actual date of birth is 21 April, but her official birthday is generally celebrated in the United Kingdom on the second Saturday in June and throughout the Commonwealth on various other dates.
Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.