How Queen Elizabeth II Preserved the Monarchy (Published 2022) (2024)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. This is “The Daily.”

The reign of Queen Elizabeth II spanned seven decades, 15 prime ministers, and 14 American presidents.

Today, my colleague, Alan Cowell, on how Queen Elizabeth saved the monarchy, even as the British Empire crumbled, and what happens now that she’s gone.

It’s Friday, September 9.

Alan, tell us your first memory of Queen Elizabeth.

It was 1953. It was the coronation. And I was six years old. And we went to a friend’s house where they had a television set, which had, like, a 9-inch screen in a huge walnut cabinet. And there, in this tiny little black-and-white image, we could see the queen’s coronation in Westminster Abbey.

It was a very touching moment. England at that time, Britain, was still recovering from the Second World War. There was rationing in force. You couldn’t get orange juice or plenty of things.

So even at that young age, I think one understood that this was the start of something, that things could get better, that the war and the war years were finally over and Britain was looking towards something new in the future.

What do you remember from what you saw on that little screen?

Well, I just remember the sight of this very small, beautifully turned out monarch being crowned. And it was kind of a fairy tale.

She wasn’t meant to be queen at all. But her uncle had abdicated the throne. And here she was. It felt like this is something we did. We had a queen. We had a new queen. It felt like the natural order of things, and it was her job to sustain that impression.

And throughout that period and throughout her entire reign, she had to preserve the essential mystique. And that relied on the pageantry and the formality of her office — the grand parades down the mall, the ceremonial occasions of the changing of the guards, and all of those moments when the symbols of her reign were on display.

But against that, she had to be adaptable. She had to be flexible. She had to change with the times. And she managed somehow to combine the rigidity and formality of the monarchy with, sometimes, a sense of humor and preserve the mystique. And her presence was not imposed upon her people. But it was somehow transmitted that she was there and she was the head of the royal family.

Even as the British Empire dwindled and shrunk back onto its island core, she maintained the role of the monarchy within that framework. And I suppose that we all, in a way, whether we admitted it or not, came to rely on that presence.

So tell me about the UK at that point when the queen came to power. What was happening?

At that time, I think the UK was really in a state of recovery. It was much weakened by the effort of the war years. The economy was in a deep shock. And suddenly, quite to everyone’s surprise, this young princess who had gone out on a trip, a formal official trip, with her husband, Prince Philip, to Kenya, and she went to sleep as a princess and she woke up as a queen because her father had died overnight. And under the rules of the monarchy, there is an instant transition.

Remind us, Alan, what the British Empire was. What did it include? It was this kind of far-flung place with lots of different countries, right?

It was indeed. It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire because it was so vast. It included India, a lot of Africa, Australia, Canada. The expansionism of the British in the 19th century had left them in control of a whole slew of countries to which they had no inherent entitlement and which had left a huge controversy about the manner of their rule, the cruelty, slavery. But at the time, it was an accepted part of life.

Queen Victoria had been the founder of this. She was the Empress of India as well as the queen of England. And that enormous empire had been handed down. And slowly, through the wars and the weakening of the central power, it was shrinking back. And so one of the first things that the new queen had to contemplate was that that empire was soon going to be whittled away.

And so how did she do that, Alan? What was her role?

Her role was largely ceremonial. And she would go herself, or she would send representatives to basically decolonize. There would be a negotiation. There would be a new constitution.

So you had a whole range of African countries — Ghana, Kenya — achieving independence in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And the queen’s role, in fact, was to — or the role she chose for herself — was to try and salvage something from this by sponsoring the Commonwealth of former colonies, as it was then known, and preserving British influence in a postcolonial world.

So how exactly did she transition beyond empire, kind of moving Britain to a new place?

I think there was a very, very important speech in 1957 —

— when she set out a new vision.

A vision of service, essentially.

That she put herself in a position not as a ruler or as a traditional monarch who would lead troops into battle or lay down the law, but as a servant of the people.

But what she could do was give them her heart.

And I know that might sound very naive, almost, now. But if you think about it, what she was doing to almost to the very, very end of her life fitted into that rubric of being a servant of the people she was leading into a new era.

And how did that manifest itself, Alan? I mean, what’s an example of that?

Well, I would say that it was a very tight definition of service because it was really wrapped up in an awful lot of formality. If you look back at the old clips of the queen going about her routine business, there’d be travels to far-flung parts of the empire, or soon-to-be former empire, where she would go through very, very closely choreographed ceremonies to greet and make friends with local people, or even traveling around in the UK, opening libraries or shipyards or launching ships. And all of these things, she did in the name of being present and showing the presence of the monarchy to the people on the ground.

And did it work? I mean, did people like this?

I think it did work because what it showed, what she showed, was that the monarchy was still strong even though the empire was weak. And she found a way of ensuring that the monarchy survived the demise of the empire, largely, and went on to give itself a new niche in a new world in the postcolonial era.

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We’ll be right back.

So, Alan, you told us that the queen was holding together this whole idea of the monarchy at a time when Britain was really changing and that she did in this kind of silent, symbolic way. But you also said she was good at adapting, bending to meet the moment. So tell me about that.

Well, I think that came to a head in 1992, when everything that she was presiding over just seemed to be unraveling.

There was a huge fire at Windsor, one of favorite residences.

There were scandals relating to her children all over the tabloids.

For instance, there were photographs of an affair between the duch*ess of York and an American millionaire.

Her daughter, Princess Anne, got divorced. Prince Andrew separated from Sarah, his wife.

Princess Diana was figured heavily in a tell-all book.

And there was more evidence of infinite conversations between Diana and the lover that were leaked. So after all that happened, Charles finally separated from Diana.

She did actually say, look, this has been a horrible year for me.

There were any number of issues, publicity that she would have preferred not to have.

And she had to, in a way, appeal for a degree of sympathy. And I think that showed her ability to adapt and be flexible. And in a way, I think a lot of people understood that.

And, Alan, why do you think she decided to tell people that her year had been horrible, I mean, actually to show herself and level with people? Why did she do that?

I think that it’s just part of her gift, her knack for finding the right moment to make these kind of gestures that count with people. In a way, it was a plea for sympathy which wasn’t always given to the monarchy because they’d been held to a much higher standard. I guess she was saying, look, we all have these problems, and I’m no different, although plainly, plainly, she was in a much more different — far different position from ordinary people.

So she was sort of nodding to the British people, in a way, and reconnecting with them, saying, I understand that this is all pretty awful. And did that work?

I think, by and large, most things that she’s done have been very carefully thought out. And the timing is all, and it was very, very, very effective.

What’s another example of the queen’s timing, the monarchy being tested and the queen being flexible at just the right moment?

Well, paradoxically, there were occasions when she seemed to get it terribly wrong. And there was no greater example of that than in 1997 after the death of Princess Diana.

When the whole nation literally was in a paroxysm of grief and mourning and was looking to the queen for a signal of some kind of acknowledgment of the enormous loss, personal loss, that people felt with the death of Princess Diana.

And she didn’t seem to give it.

She secluded herself in Balmoral with Diana and Charles’s sons, William and Harry, and really cited the need to protect those children as the reason for not emerging into the public eye. And it was the beginning of a crisis that built very, very visibly.

People were saying, she’s lost her touch. This is it.

Why isn’t she saying something? Why isn’t she sharing our grief with us?

And, of course, she had good advice from Tony Blair, an archpolitician, a very deft politician, who advised her that if she wanted to get the situation back under control, she needed to make a big gesture to the people. So she came back to London.

She gave a very important public address.

And I think, most significantly of all —

As the funeral cortege with Diana’s coffin was passing in front of Buckingham Palace —

She bowed her head as the coffin went by. And it really was a tremendously powerful gesture and acknowledgment of Diana’s role and importance. Monarchs don’t bow to anybody else. Other people bow to them.

And there had been all the speculation that she didn’t respect Diana, she didn’t like her, that she was being high-handed towards the memory of Diana. And with that single solemn nod of the head, she reversed all of that imagery and did indeed begin to turn the situation around.

So, again, by being flexible, by adapting, the queen repairs relations with her subjects.

Exactly. But I think sometimes it is only under enormous pressure, that her first instinct that she’s been brought up with is to be discreet, to refrain from bowing to public outcry, to maintain her dignity and aloofness. And when she does it, it has to count because I think it was a huge gesture. And it must have been very carefully thought out on her part.

Are there any other instances where the monarchy seemed imperiled and she had to react?

I think these moments seem to come thick and fast, and they almost accelerated the older she got.

One of course, was the relationship that soured between Buckingham Palace and Harry and Meghan.

They chose to renounce their position as fully-fledged royals and move to California, which was quite embarrassing for the queen.

And remind us, Alan, what did the queen do?

She made it very clear that Harry was no longer a fully-fledged royal.

He was stripped of some positions. He was not allowed to have the kind of security detail that he would normally have expected. And he was basically cast into the outer darkness as far as being what he had been, which was a fully-fledged member of the royal family.

So when it came to the crown and her grandson, she chose the crown.

Absolutely. She chose the crown, and she always did. And she went on even with her son Andrew, who had become embroiled in a scandal relating to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier who was a convicted sex offender. When that blew up, the same thing happened as it happened with Harry —

— which was that he was stripped of royal duties. He was not allowed to preside over events that he would have done. Certain military ranks were withdrawn.

And he, too, was sent into what — I guess a kind of internal exile.

So it’s almost as though, in the beginning of her reign, the threats were external, from the outside world, the threats to the monarchy. And at the end of her reign, the threats were from inside, from her own family.

I think that it had been a developing trend throughout her reign. The standards that she aspired to and that she stuck to just were too much for the next generations. And with the exception, perhaps, of Prince William, none of those subsequent descendants was able to come up to the same levels of respectability, probity, as she had displayed throughout her reign.

Alan, that brings us to her death and to the fact that her son Charles is now finally king. What will it mean for the monarchy and for the United Kingdom?

I think there’s a huge burden that will fall on his shoulders. There are no high expectations of Charles. He’s got a reputation for having embraced some fairly quirky ideas in his time. He’s been a king-in-waiting for a long, long time. And a lot of people have had time to prejudge him.

So he must somehow reassert the validity of the monarchy’s role at a time when it could well come under renewed challenge. What held it together, what holds it together, was Elizabeth and her memory. And somehow, he needs to harness those feelings of respect for his mother to be able to navigate through very, very choppy waters into the monarchy’s future.

Do you think that her success was singular? I mean, did it have to do with her? Or was it more about the position she inherited?

I think it was very much to do with her. I mean, it was how she played it. Plenty of members of her family, her own sister, people played things in a different way. They partied or they gallivanted or whatever.

And she didn’t. She chose not to. She devoted herself, as she said way back, that she could give the British people her heart and the Commonwealth people her heart. And I think that’s what she tried to do. It was very much her personal style and manner that held things together.

And the monarchy, for all its clever PR and its facility with pageantry and symbols, still comes down to the personality of the person at the head of it. And that is going to be Charles’s biggest challenge — King Charles’s biggest challenge.

And, of course, Charles is, in some ways, coming to the throne at an even more challenging time than his mother did. I mean, Britain is in a perilous place, economically, and really, in terms of its place in the world. It’s farther than ever from its sort of glorious past, the past of empire that his mother was kind of tapping into.

I think that’s right. If you look across the — where Britain is at the moment, it’s left the European Union. There’s the whole question of cost of living, the soaring price of energy. There is a sense of malaise and gathering crisis across the political front. And it makes it more difficult for King Charles to act.

He has got very strong credentials on some issues that count a lot for Britain’s future — notably, his approach to climate change and global warming. He could give a lead where Britain needs it to help it look to a future where these crises it has at the moment because of its energy dependence on outsiders will be a thing of the past.

But, again, as with his mother, it’ll come down to his personality and whether he, after all this time waiting, finally steps up to the throne with his visions intact and able to be transmitted to the people in a manner that gives them confidence. I think there’ll be probably a honeymoon period. People will be fairly ready to forgive him initially. But in the long term, that might not last. And if that doesn’t last, it does not augur well for the future of the monarchy.

Yeah. Alan, how did you feel when you heard the queen had died?

It was a difficult moment because, as a journalist, I didn’t want to feel involved at all. I’d spent many years writing about the queen, and I’d always striven for objectivity in my reporting. And against that, there was the feeling I’m sure many Britons have that this is a changing of the guard in a major way and that we’re in a new era with incalculable coordinates.

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Across the road there’s a local parish church, St. Anne’s. And just after the announcement that the queen had died, the single toll of a bell went on for a couple of hours. And I think that that sort of — the curfew tolls the knell of parting day was how a lot of people would have felt. A day was parting, and we don’t really know what tomorrow will bring.

Alan, thank you.

Thank you, Sabrina. Thank you very much. It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you this evening and discuss these issues. Thank you.

We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Here’s what else you should know today. On Thursday, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that advocates for abortion rights could add a question to the ballot in November that would ask voters whether to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. The measure had previously been blocked by a state board that cited typographical issues on the petition to include the question on ballots. The measure to enshrine abortion rights will bring even more attention to the November election in Michigan, a swing state with several closely contested races on the ballot.

Today’s episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Stella Tan, Mooj Zadie, Jessica Cheung, and Lynsea Garrison, with help from Rachel Quester and Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Michael Benoist, Lisa Chow, and Paige Cowett, and fact-checked by Susan Lee. It contains original music by Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, and Marion Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Special thanks to Eva Krysiak. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you on Monday.