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She wasn’t just Britain’s Queen — Elizabeth II belonged to the world. It’s moving how the peoples of so many nations embraced this quiet, emotionally reticent woman who reigned in a country that once bestrode the world as an empire. In her decades at the helm, she found a different role, with monarchy as the glue of continuity.
In the pantheon of postwar greats, Nelson Mandela is revered as the man who healed his divided nation’s wounds after years in captivity, Pope John Paul II is remembered for his spiritual and physical courage in the face of Nazi and Communist dictatorships, and Martin Luther King Jr. is immortalized for his crusade against racial injustice. A number of world leaders have given stirring speeches that marked and even changed the course of history.
But the Queen? What heroic feats did she perform? What memorable lines did she deliver to match the soaring rhetoric of John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, let alone the orotund phrase-making of her first prime minister, Winston Churchill? Yet Elizabeth would become the most recognizable human being on the planet. Millions paid attention when she spoke and, crucially for a job that often was more significant in its silences, what she embodied.
Her talent was to seem so unknowable while living a life exposed to the attention of millions. Biographers and the watchful royal press have searched in vain for memorable bons mots or opinions that the longest-serving monarch in British history uttered in private. Yet every attempt to chart her inner life results in telling you more about the writer than the subject. When she did allow an opinion to shimmer through the careful calibration (as during her sometimes tense relationship with Margaret Thatcher), it was expressed in nuance or reported facial twitches — never in a showdown.
