ELIZABETH II

Queen of the world

AFP, London

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was not just Queen Elizabeth II. She was simply The Queen.

For billions of people, she was the one constant in a world of bewildering change, an omnipresent matriarch linking the past with the present.

While the enormous British Empire she once presided over shrank, her symbolic influence only seemed to grow, her mystique bolstered by films like “The Queen” and the Netflix series “The Crown”.

Against the tide of history and logic, she made a medieval anachronism somehow modern, a stoic old lady in a hat onto whom so much could be projected. Perhaps only the pope held as much sway, and she saw seven of them come and go during her record-breaking seven-decade reign.

Although Elizabeth Windsor became the very definition of the word, she was not born to be queen.

An accident of history brought her to the throne.

Until her “Uncle David” -- Edward VIII -- abdicated to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson in 1936, she had only an outside chance of reigning.

Even as heir apparent, the birth of a baby brother would have sent her back into relative aristocratic obscurity under succession laws in place at the time that gave precedence to males.

All changed for “Lilibet” when she was 10 and her reluctant, stammering father became George VI.

Her tough-minded mother, also called Elizabeth, was her emotional lodestar. She made sure the girls had an “insulated and care-free childhood” in contrast to the suffocating Palace strictures their father suffered. Nevertheless, she learned duty early.

An introvert, she adapted easily to the “magnificent isolation” of royal life spent surrounded by scores of servants and courtiers.

Her coronation on June 2, 1953 was the first major event of the television age.

But for all the glamour of the young queen -- then just 25 -- and talk of a second Elizabethan age, Imperial Britain was in trouble. India -- the so-called “Jewel in the Crown” -- had already gained independence in 1947.

Hard-won victory in World War II had left the country exhausted and virtually bankrupt, its cities bomb-scarred and rationing was in its 14th year. The Suez Crisis in 1956 would deal Britain’s status as a world power a final shattering blow.

With the ageing Winston Churchill -- the first of 15 British prime ministers to serve under her -- at her side, she began to slowly reinvent the institution.

The queen was 13 when she fell for her 18-year-old third cousin Philip in 1939, then a dashing naval cadet preparing to go to war.

In 1947, despite her mother’s reservations, she married the impecunious Danish-Greek prince. She gave birth to Charles 11 months later and Anne followed in 1950. Andrew -- said to be her favourite -- arrived in 1960, with Edward born four years later.

The queen was a one-man woman, who “never looked at anyone else”, her cousin and confidant Margaret Rhodes said.

Philip’s marital fidelity was reportedly less sure, but his sense of duty was equally iron cast. Their 73-year partnership, which lasted until his death in April 2021, was her “strength and stay”, the queen later confessed.

They both loved horses. In later life she developed a fondness for television soap operas.

Despite various scandals within the royal family, the monarch herself remained hugely popular and admired, an embodiment of traditional values and all that seemed eternal about England.