Queen Elizabeth II: The dutiful has been on the throne for 70 years

Our life, says Psalm 90, “is seventy years.” Our life, mind you, not our professional life. The average life expectancy of people in Western industrialized countries is now significantly higher than it was around two and a half thousand years ago in the Old Testament. But how many can say of themselves that they have practiced the same profession for seventy years? As of this Sunday, a short-statured lady in the small English town of Windsor, senior boss of a thriving family business of the same name, belongs to this exclusive group.

On February 6, 1952, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor ascended the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which at the time still included an empire, as Elizabeth II. With decolonization, the end of the Cold War and the rise of Asia, not least the superpower China, the country's global influence has declined.

But the island still has significant soft power, and the world's most photographed woman has her share of that.

The Danes also have a queen, the Dutch even had three in a row until 2013. But when the keyword Queen is mentioned, everyone around the world immediately knows who is meant: the head of state of 15 sovereign states and chairperson of the Commonwealth, an association of 54 mostly British ex-colonies, which together represent around a quarter of the states and a quarter of all people on earth .

14 prime ministers ruled in their regency

Boris Johnson is the 14th Prime Minister of her term, Joe Biden the number 14 of US Presidents, Olaf Scholz the ninth German Chancellor - for most of those alive today, the Queen has always been there. Already on her 40th anniversary in 1992, the then poet laureate Ted Hughes expressed this in an unsentimental way by describing the perception of the monarch: "All see the crown/Some the mother/One the woman/Some her life" (All see the Crown/Some the mother/One his wife/Some their life).

Every day the number of those who remember Elizabeth's father, George VI, dwindles. After fifteen years of reign since 1936, the 56-year-old was about to die from lung cancer; But on that February 6, 1952, at Sandringham Castle in Norfolk, it came as a surprise. The Crown Princess and her husband Philip were on a royal visit to Kenya; they had spent the night of death in the seclusion of Aberdare National Park, watching animals at dawn. Far later than millions of her subjects, the 25-year-old mother of two young children learned the sad news that changed her life.

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Since then she has had two more sons, has been a grandmother of eight and a great-grandmother of twelve. She has lived "a life so extraordinarily privileged and so extraordinarily restricted," as her best biographer Ben Pimlott once described it. In recent years she has witnessed the fate of many very old people whose friends of the same age are gradually dying away. Last year she had to bury her husband Philip, 99, after 73 years of marriage.

Her legendary robust health has recently taken a hit; in the fall, her doctors forced the cancellation of a number of appointments. "She worked like she was 75 then," says Penny Junor, author of numerous books on royalty. "But her body said 95." That the queen had to spend a night in hospital, which the palace has tried to hide, has reminded Brits of the mortality of the seemingly permanent queen. But there are no real warning signs.

Silent, steady, dutiful

When asked about Elizabeth's achievements, historian Suzannah Lipscomb describes "constancy and longevity" in an age of constant change. The royal observer also finds the Queen's iron silence admirable, despite all parodies, caricatures, imitations, most recently in the much-praised TV series "The Crown". Of course, the quality is also part of it, more or less silently following the changes in the surrounding society. In the year of their accession to the throne, divorced people were undesirable at court; three of their four children are now divorced themselves, and the divorced heir to the throne Charles has married Camilla, who is also divorced.

She has shown herself to the population as often as possible over the past seven decades, preferably in flamboyant clothes and under transparent umbrellas. "You have to see me to believe in me," Elizabeth herself once said. After all, this belief has not been lost in the thoroughly secular country: the approval ratings for the Queen remain sensational, even if the people see them less frequently in the meantime.

Instead of cultivating the "smallest of small talk", as Philip biographer Gyles Brandreth called the most banal small talk imaginable in most royal encounters with her subjects, the rather shy Ms. Windsor would certainly have preferred to become a completely normal country gentry, surrounded by horses and dogs . The service as monarch did not allow for this option, and there is also no question of a well-deserved retirement; The trauma of Edward VIII's abdication is still too deep in the 95-year-old. brought to the throne.

"Much better than talking, don't you think?"

David Nott reported a scene to the Sunday newspaper Observer in 2019 that says a lot about the Queen as a dog lover and judge of human nature. At lunch at Buckingham Palace, the doctor and author sat next to the Queen, who turned to him with her standard question: where is he from? "From Aleppo," replied the doctor, who had recently returned from the Syrian civil war. "And how was that?" was the neutral follow-up question.

Nott fell silent, visibly fighting back tears, his head filled with images of bloodied children and destroyed homes. The Queen silently placed her hand on his, took a dog biscuit from a silver tin that was on the table in front of her, broke it in half, gave her guest a piece and asked, "Shall we feed the dogs?" Nott's tension eased as the the two were busy with the corgis who rushed over enthusiastically. Satisfied, the Queen said, "Much better than talking, don't you think?"

more on the subject

With this principle, the Queen is going into the 71st year of her term of office, and the country wants to celebrate three days at the beginning of June. This Sunday, gratitude for “Elizabeth the Dutiful”, as historian Andrew Roberts calls his monarch, is mixed with the memory of the father who was her role model. In many places, however, the British are celebrating the day with thanksgiving services, in which the last words of the national anthem may sound even more fervent than usual: "God bless the Queen, may she reign long over us."