Vivat! An appreciation of the life of The Queen

It was on the afternoon of June 2, 1953, that I first set eyes on Queen Elizabeth, whose coronation took place that day in Westminster Abbey. She was 27, I was four. She had grown up amid the splendour of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral; I was raised in Ballyhackamore, in East Belfast, and watched the ceremony – or as much of it as I could take in – in the community hall of Gilnahirk Presbyterian Church, where my granny was housekeeper to the minister, Mr Best, and my grandpa dug the graves. 

A 14-inch black and white television had been set up on the stage and I remember how dim and grainy the picture was. But I distinctly recall the Archbishop of Canterbury placing the crown – which seemed enormous – on the Queen’s head and the shout that rang out: “Vivat! Vivat Regina!” 

Everybody in the hall cheered and clapped. Some of the women, maybe even one of two of the men, must have had tears in their eyes, but I don’t remember. All I knew was that this was a very important day and that the Queen, apparently, would live for ever. 

Between that moment and the announcement of her death, aged 96, Queen Elizabeth did indeed seem eternal. She was always there, never absent from the life of the nation. Her Christmas broadcast drew a huge audience each year, and, until the intervention of The Troubles, her periodic visits to Ulster, as to all parts of the Kingdom, were major events, untroubled by Republican grumbles, at which men bowed their heads and women curtsied and small children looked on wide-eyed and wondering. 

The older generation had known their Queen for a long time before she assumed the throne. They remembered her as the lively daughter of the then Duke of York, the future George VI, who was promoted unexpectedly to kingly rank by the abdication crisis. Had Edward VIII not met Mrs Simpson, there would never have been a second Elizabethan Age and Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, born on April 21,1926 at the London home of her maternal grandfather, the Earl of Strathmore, would in all likelihood have lived out her life much as Sophie Rhys Jones, wife of Prince Edward, as the Countess of Wessex, does today. 

But fate was to intervene, and thus, on February 6, 1952, upon the death of her much-loved father, she was pronounced Queen of the United Kingdom, its Empire and Commonwealth, taking, to no one’s surprise, the regnal name, Elizabeth. 

The decades that followed were not, for the most part, a seamless robe of triumph. Britain was making its way, fitfully, through a long period of economic decline combined with a reduction in its global power and influence. Its colonies were peeling off, one by one, and the dominions – Canada, Australia and New Zealand – increasingly went their own way. 

Only the Queen was constant. Her prime ministers came and went, from Churchill – arguably the Last Great Englishman – by way of Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Home, Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, all the way to Boris Johnson and, just this week, Liz Truss. Her Majesty was ailing and her latest prime minister travelled to Balmoral, rather than Buckingham Palace, to kiss hands. She was received for the purpose in a drawing room of the castle – her favourite home in all of the United Kingdom – in front of a roaring fire. The Queen looked tiny, as if she was about to disappear, but smiled throughout, providing a final image of her as the nation’s matriarch that seems certain to endure.  

The relationships forged between the monarch and her first ministers – who were received in audience each Tuesday afternoon, usually at the Palace – were rarely publicised. While royal advice was often sought, discretion was the order of the day. The one notable exception to the long-established convention came in 2014 when David Cameron somewhat unwisely revealed that the Queen had “purred with pleasure” upon learning that the Scots had voted against independence. As for those for whom she felt the truest affection, suffice to say that, having lived through the War, she adored and was slightly in awe of Churchill, greatly respected Mr Attlee and felt most at ease with Macmillan, Wilson and Callaghan. 

She is said to have found Margaret Thatcher – the first woman to occupy Downing Street – difficult but intriguing during the ten years they coincided. Thatcher, for her part, though famously sharp with ministerial colleagues, was, as the daughter of an aspirational Lincolnshire shopkeeper, unfailingly deferential, always ready to curtsey in the presence of her sovereign, and was eventually rewarded with the Order of Merit. 

Abroad, Elizabeth never put a foot wrong. She famously regarded her position as head of the Commonwealth as central to her role and, remarkably, given that most of the leaders she met in the early years of her reign had grown up demanding independence from Britain, she continued to be held in great affection wherever she went. 

In America, where overt republicanism and quiet reverence for majesty go hand in hand, the Queen was hugely popular. Presidents were thrilled to meet her. State visits to the UK in which gold carriages and state banquets featured were particularly prized. Ronald Reagan, as an accomplished B-List actor, was much appreciated by his host. He charmed her and made her laugh. Much later, she was keenly aware of the significance of Barack Obama as the first black occupant of the Oval Office and was appeared genuinely interested in what he had to say, even if he did lean in a little too close over dinner. But Donald Trump, a swaggering buffoon, must have seemed to her, as he did to Pope Francis, an affront to the values she held most dear. 

Europe, of course, adores royalty, nowhere more so than France, whose heads of state, from whichever party, were never more preening than when exchanging observations, in French, with Sa Majesté. It might be thought odd that, due to the vagaries of French elections, De Gaulle never had the chance to welcome the Queen to Versailles, but François Mitterrand more than made up for the deficiency, kissing the royal hand as if to the manor born, even ordering that the aircraft taking his most distinguished guest back to the UK should be escorted by French fighter jets. 

It will have come as no surprise that President Macron was one of the first to pay homage to her memory, ordering that the lights of the Eiffel Tower be switched off to mark her passing. 

It was closer to home as her reign wore on that the greatest problems arose. The Royal Family may be unlike most families, but it shares with them an increasing tendency to rows, division and divorce. Above all there was Diana, a cuckoo in the nest from Day One, whose all-too-public separation from the then Prince of Wales, ending in her death in a Paris underpass, was the lowest point in the Queen’s reign. Her response to what happened was the moment when she seemed most out of touch with her subjects, millions of whom, caught up in a media-inspired hysteria, shared Tony Blair’s inflated view that Diana was the “People’s Princess”. 

Then there was Prince Andrew, once the monarch’s favourite son, about whom these days the less said, the better. If Andrew had set out to embarrass his mother, rather than simply to indulge himself at her expense, he could scarcely have done a better job. The same, though without the scandal, is true of Prince Harry, whose defection to California as Prince Consort to Megan Markle surely caused her lasting grief. 

Prince Edward, who it is said may soon be elevated to the dukedom of Edinburgh, learned early on that while royalty may be a form of show business, It’s a Royal Knockout, was not its best look. Today, Edward, is much more serious, in the mould of his sister, Anne, the Princess Royal, who has earned her popularity because of, rather than in spite of, her tough-as-nails approach to her duties. 

As heir to the throne – now, at long last, King Charles III – the former Prince of Wales played no small part part in the indignities of the 1990s, casting his wife aside for Camilla Parker Bowles, an old flame from his youth, whom we must now honour as the Queen Consort to His Majesty. But Charles has since made up for his errant behaviour and looks ready to keep the throne warm for his own eldest son, William, the Duke of Cambridge, soon, surely, to succeed him as Prince of Wales. William’s happy marriage to Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, as well as his quiet dedication to his duties, greatly gladdened the heart of his grandmother in her final years. 

It is appropriate here to mention the Queen’s love of Scotland, childhood home of her mother, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Her purring down the throne to David Cameron was anything but forced. She felt most at home in the Highlands, close to where her mother had grown up, and she loved Edinburgh, its capital.  

It would also be entirely right to allude to her Christian faith, which sustained her though so many crises, public and private. It was her religious belief that more than anything else prevented her from abdicating in favour of her son, who it was beginning to look might die before her. But at her coronation she had worn an oath to be queen for the entirety of her life and she felt bound by it.

“The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.” 

Above all, it is important to record the Queen’s devotion to her late husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Wherever she went and whatever the controversies, Philip, her liege man of life and limb, was always by her side, never imposing himself but, as she put it herself in a deeply-felt tribute following his death in 2020, just short of his hundredth birthday, at all times her “rock”. 

It was during the Duke’s funeral, celebrated in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, that the Queen looked most alone and most isolated. The nation’s heart went out to her. Covid restrictions had separated her from her immediate family, but it was the loss of Philip that had effectively brought down the curtain on her life. In the months that followed, she was attentive to her duties, talking each week to her prime minister and others and, in November 2021, making a key intervention online during the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow in which she invoked her husband’s memory while pleading with delegates not to think of themselves, “but of their children and their children’s children and those who come after them.” 

And then she added: “We none of us will live forever.”

Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, died in harness. She would have had it no other way.

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